Mayday Painting

(click for larger image)

In case you’ve been wondering, I took a hiatus since last week, but picked up the brushes again today. It’s still going well, I think. Whether or not I can get it to conform with my ultimate mental picture is anyone’s guess, though.

-o.o-

Wednesday’s Work: Mixing Flesh Tones

I didn’t paint yesterday, but made up for it today, I think. It’s still got a ways to go, but getting the faces right is two-thirds of the battle, and they’re pretty close now.

I finally got smart and made a flesh-tone palette before I even picked up a brush; it made all the difference.

(Color mixing advice follows)

I was finally able to figure out why the skin tones were so cold: I originally used cadmium red medium (the four lower left samples) to mix the tones. As you can see, the result is surprisingly cool. Today I worked with mainly the cad. red light mixtures (the four across the top). On the left are alizarin crimson mixes, which look much darker on the screen than in real life, and are the coolest in tone. For any frustrated painters out there, here’s how to mix flesh tones:

Generally, caucasian flesh is a mix of equal parts red and a darkish yellow, with a dab of green or blue to tone down the reds. For this palette, I mixed the reds first with yellow ochre, then with raw sienna, then did two version of each mixture, one with a dab of sap green and one with a dab of ultramarine. The lighter samples are a dab of each mixed color added to titanium white. If you’re having a hard time getting just the right skin tone, this is a good way to find it. Plus, if you take a picture you’ve got a cheat sheet for future reference, to save you from having to mix all those colors again just to find the one you wanted.

-o.o-

Not Slacking (updated)

For those who are interested, I have actually been working on the painting I re-started on Friday. It’s nowhere near finished, but it’s come a long way, I think. To see the progress, click the “read more” link below:

Yesterday’s Progress

I’ll have a regular photo and haiku up in a little bit, but I did some initial painting yesterday as well.

(click for larger)

It’s already a better painting than it was.

Whew!

I seem to be on a roll, so perhaps tomorrow I’ll have more to show.

-o.o-

Sketch and Surprise

Well, that was interesting. In some places, I was quite close; others, not so much. Until I get the first layers of paint on the canvas, that blue sketch is going to be quite a struggle to work around.

Walking through the living room to put the canvas outside and spray it, I went through a patch of light.

!

-o.o-

Friday Portrait (well, sort of)

One good thing that may have come from the barrage of appalling “art” projects this week is that I have been reminded that real art, at its best, manages to convey some type of transcendence. When I graduated from college, the art world had very recently featured the elephant-dung Madonna (which I saw in real life; the dung was actually not particularly offensive, being sealed into ball form and used as “feet” to hold up the painting; of far greater concern was the multitudes of little gyno shots, cut out from porno magazines and collaged all over the painting. But they didn’t show well in photos, I guess, so the elephant dung ruled the controversy) and “Piss Christ.” In response to that, I focused on a subtle bit of religious iconography myself, but instead of trying to be offensive I was hoping to portray the transcendence of ordinary people, the little spark of potential holiness that resides in each human being. I won’t pretend I was successful, but I did form the seeds of some potentially good ideas.

I had decided last fall (here) to revisit one of the paintings that I did in my senior year. Of course, being the slacker that I am I did a small amount of work, then set it aside, still woefully unfinished. Yesterday’s news cycle has in-spired me to get back to it, and to hopefully show that the aforementioned seeds were planted in fertile soil.

Here’s the original image again:

Everything Old is New Again

 

 

 

 

Skully’s Call this weekend was far more effective, for me at least, than I initially realized. As I scrambled around Saturday, shuffling through piles of largely forgotten photos (easy to forget when you’re used to sifting through a few thousand images neatly stashed in iPhoto) in search of that one that I thought was really funny, I came across several that I had misplaced over the years. Particularly, a few images that I once thought would make good paintings, or were simply good photos worthy of being shared at some point.

 

The above is from the night my sister got married, just a few weeks before 9/11. The moon was rising over the trees of my mom’s place in the outskirts of Buckley, Washington. I had a roll of black and white film that I didn’t use during the wedding, and was lucky enough to get this shot as the fun was winding down.