Oil Pastel Demo part 2

Green Window - pencil, charcoal and oil pastel on paper - 11 x 14

It's done (tentatively, as always). I decided I really didn't like the green on her face, and I always have the pic of it from above, so I scraped it off as well as I could. That's one of the fun techniques with oil pastels, especially in the later stages when you're putting it on thick over top of the wash drawing. I have a nifty little tool called a burnisher (seen below) that I keep in the box with the cray-pas because its so amazingly useful when working with them.

These things are sold through the MicroMark website as a burnisher, for burnishing down the edges of masking tape and similar type stuff - they also make great sculpting tools and excellent oil pastel tools. The end that's close to the camera, with the red wax on it, is a little spoon shape - the back side of it is for burnishing and smoothing things down, but turned up like this it's good for scraping off some color from a stick of oil pastel. Once you've got a little glob of colored wax you can sort of place it oh so carefully right where you need an accent and then burnish it down to make it permanent - it becomes like a thick little glob of paint there, totally opaque. I used this trick to put the highlights in her eyes and a few other things. The other end of the burnisher is a little blade (not sharp really) that I use to scrape off unwanted wax, like the green on her face.

I discovered charcoal is excellent for making dark parts (the wall behind her). Just be sure to always blow off any loose charcoal dust carefully before it gets stuck in the wax anywhere and makes a nuisance of itself. Then you need to rub over it to sort of blend it down into the wax.

You can manipulate the wax in all sorts of ways - to finish this one up I was rubbing with my fingers, scrubbing with paper towels, using the point or edge of the scraper to remove tiny little dots of wax that just didn't look right (it's easy to get those when working with something as messy as cray-pas).

Oil Pastel Demo

I got in a couple of new drawing pads and wanted to try one of them out, so I decided to go ahead and do it last night. Here's a drawing I cranked out - I did this loose and modern-style partly because it's quicker but also I like working like this sometimes:

his one and the 2 at the end were done on the scanner, the rest I just shot on a digital camera, that's why the quality of them is pretty poor. But it's good enough to demonstrate the steps.

Here I've sealed the pencil drawing with 3 good heavy coats of Krylon Matte Finish spray. It also helps to use a fairly hard pencil - otherwise the next step can really smear up the graphite and make a big mess of it.

I picked 2 oil pastels, both pretty unsaturated earth tones - one a light brown and the other a darkish yellow - this creates the overall tone for the drawing. This technique is actually very similar to techniques used by artists from at least the Renaissance if not earlier - though usually they'd do the initial drawing on paper that was already toned in a light flesh color or some light neutral color like grey or green. Not having any such toned paper I decided to tone it myself.

It's been a long time since I did this, and I had forgotten you really need to keep your scribbly lines pretty close together to avoid what you can see below - the lines didn't completely 'melt' and you can still see some of them in places.

All I did here was to fold over a paper towel 3 or 4 times, hold it tightly over the opening of my turpenoid can, and tip it. Then I took the moistened paper towel and scrubbed rather vigorously all over, going against the grain of the lines and trying to make them disappear. Turpenoid is an oil painting medium and bush cleaner - it's essentially a far less toxic version of turpentine with almost no odor.

Here I picked a darker brown and laid in the hair color. This one was burnt umber, a classic earth tone, and it melts into the turpenoid a lot easier than the other colors I've used so far.

When you scrub it down it creates a really soft beautiful effect. Wish all the colors would do that!

Used some more burnt umber to scrub shading into the background in places and also certain parts of the face/hand. It gives it all a nice look and starts to create some shading. I also decided to lighten up the hair a bit and let more of the paper's texture show through.

Now it's almost finished. Did some more shading on the skin with a sort of orange color, then some highlights with white and a few little touches of color here and there. It's a slight variation on the three-tone drawing system used by the old masters, only I deviated from the strict three color rule and used a little more color. But I did most of the work only with a dark and a white on the toned ground, which is a great way to learn abut the basics of painting or realistic fully-shaded drawing technique. In case your wondering, at this point I didn't like the pale pencil lines so I took a softer pencil (a 2B) and drew right over them. Once you've got some wax on the surface of the drawing (oil pastels are in a wax base - they're really just like extra-soft crayons) the pencil really glides smoothy and makes very dark marks very easily. I couldn't believe I was able to go over all the lines with almost no screw-ups! Got lucky on that one. Oh, and for this kind of line quality you have to hold the pencil 'underhand' - not the way you would when writing, and use big arcing motions of the entire arm to draw.

Finished up with some pale green. The window behind her is a classic example of overpainting - where you have the drawing on a toned ground and then come in at the end with a new color representing bright glaring light and paint opaquely right over the darker colors. It would look a lot better if the drawing was overall darker and if the green was brighter.

It was hard to learn to stop 'coloring inside the lines' - it actually looks a lot better if you leave gaps to show the underlying colors so people can see the technique and the simplicity of it. Some people may prefer the step before the last one - when it still looked pretty realistic. The green in the shadows gives it a much more modern look.

The original looks much better than the reproduction does - a transparent art medium (like an oil pastel wash) has a nice glow to it and the colors blend beautifully in a way that can't be captured by a photograph or scanner. In the reproductions colors look harsh and dark and gritty - whites and other colors seem to have hard outlines around them. None of this is there when you look at the original. It makes it frustrating - I can't really show what my work looks like online or in any way unless people want to come over and see the originals..

Green Window

Just finished this one - worked on it for 3 days I think, done in pencil charcoal and oil pastels on paper:

Old stuff digitally re-worked

Cornflower Blue - pencil and oil paint on paper, finished digitally

Purple Sky - pencil and oil pastel on paper, finished digitally

Some stuff from old sketchbooks

Got my ld scanner hooked up, and sure enough, it works with the new computer!

I think I'm starting to absorb Kent Williams…

Ever since around the time I started to get good at drawing he's been there, appearing on the scene suddenly like a rock star artist, kicking ass hard and always doing exciting things. 

Immediately I wanted to be him, or at least to be like him. 

I couldn't ignore him, and he exerted a powerful gravitational force that affected nearly all my efforts. Pretty much every time I drew or painted something I was either trying to be like him, or deliberately trying NOT to be like him. It's what I figure things must have been like for a lot of the fantasy painters in the 60s and 70's with Frazetta. For a while I was afraid Frazetta might influence me too much, but that actually doesn't seem to be the case - although that might just be because I haven't actually tried paperback-style fantasy art yet. My Fafhrd and the Mouser paintings don't look like fantasy art yet - well, except for Longbow, and actually that one does show a bit too much Frazetta influence, doesn't it? 

But most of my work does show some level of Williams influence. Except for a particular way I draw when I build up a mass of lines into a thick outline that seems to vibrate with energy and that also seems far more accurately to delineate anatomy than a single line. That approach was actually inspired way back in the 90's or even maybe the late 80's by Mark Texiera, but I absorbed it and was able to make it my own, rather than it still looking like his. Whenever I try to do anything williams-derivative though it's not my own and it really shows his influence. Usually anyway. 

Recently though I suddenly understood that he really doesn't always distort as much as I thought he did. In fact now I can quite clearly see that he does that mostly just in his GN work and his sketchbook work - his gesture sketches. His big fine art paintings aren't distorted at all really, aside from the occasional slightly exaggerated curve or angle, but when he does that the lines still seem to start and stop at the right place. And I suppose it's largely his crazy powerful way of painting that makes it seem like his work is so unrealistic - but when you examine it really it's extremely accurate (again, talking about his big paintings). Occasionally he does exaggerate a bit on purpose - for instance in the figure called Vampire in the original sketch, with elongated arms and legs. And often the limbs are extra skinny and stretched out. But allowing for this exaggeration, all the bony landmarks and muscular forms are there in exactly the right places. Just skinnier. And maybe bent a bit farther than is really possible. 

But anyway, the point is - what I really mean (Hah! I LOVE when I can sneak in an Elton John lyric!) - he's a very versatile artist, capable of several different ways of working, some of which are pretty distorted, some of which are extremely accurate. I think he uses wild seemingly almost random painting techniques over some of the accurate figures which makes them feel powerfully distorted (to me anyway), but when examined many of them really aren't. 

Hmmm - didn't mean to spend so much time on just distortion and accuracy - that's only one issue here. Williams is also a very iconic artist. A rock star, as I said. He doesn't do anything conservatively - it's always explosive and bold. He's obviously one who would rather see a mark made boldly and wrong than carefully and right. 

But in looking through his books and my folder full of images gathered from the web (including some shots he posted of some of his big paintings in progress, using a blue underpainting technique) it's clear that he actually has a good deal of technique and accuracy. Craft in other words. 

When I'm setting out to do a piece and I want it to look like something he might do (which is all too often) I tend to go at it very haphazardly, just slashing lines around too fast and not paying much attention - hoping that if I keep working that way I'll somehow get better at it. But I know the marks that look like they were made fast really weren't. I've seen that a few times, and heard it from the artists themselves. You don't abandon all craft and just go nuts - instead you draw very carefully - using every bit of technique and accuracy you can muster, and you draw in such a way that it looks a bit crazy. It's partly in how the pencil is held - underhand rather than like you're writing, and you make moves of the entire arm and wrist rather than just the fingers. You can do it fairly rapidly if you're working from reference - either a photo or a model. That's when you've got guides for exactly where to place your lines and forms, and can think a lot more about expression of character and niceties of the pose rather than having to think about basic proportioning and anatomy like you do when you're working from the imagination. 

I suppose a good way to encapsulate the intent of this post is to say - I've always had a certain 'Kent Williams Mode' that I drop into when I want to work like he does (or at least like I imagined he did). And that mode is actually wrong. He's much more careful and methodical than I wanted to imagine. I've actually come to this realization a few times before, at least dimly. But somehow I always managed to forget it afterwards and slip right back into 'Kent Williams Mode'. But now I'm on this concentrated art advancement thing and it's come to my attention once again that this imaginary mode of mine is totally wrong and destructive - in fact if I want to be more like him (which is not to say to make my art look more like his) I'd do well to be more accurate and methodical. 

What exactly am I doing?

It occurs to me that I don't usually set out to create artwork - everything is an exercise or an experiment. One piece I did that I think was done as artwork and not an exercise was the Beastseekers painting I did with Winton painting medium (the slow-drying stuff), with me and Rob as kids standing on the cliff. And it looks great. 

I do go into a different mindset - for instance when doing a school assignment. Or when showing off. But if my thinking is that I'm doing this piece just to build skills, then it's different. 

Also, I need to start learning how to create genre work, or type-specific work. Example, something that would work in a graphic novel, as opposed to something that would work as an illustration. And illustration is too broad a term - it encompasses the Brandywine school and Sienkiewiecz - totally different. Williams has his GN stuff, his big wall paintings, which are his most realistic work, and his sketchbook exercises, all of which are quite different. There's 60s/70s type paperback fantasy painting, there's 80's style GN/Epic Illustrated stuff, there's comic book (many different subdivisions there, 60's Kirby-style, or 80's Byrne/Austin?)

This is something an aspiring pro needs to be well aware of - it wouldn't do to get an email from an art director asking what genres you can do and you reply "what do you mean?"