Today was the last day of the figure painting workshop…and of my summer GCA adventures. More on that in a bit. For now, I have a pretty good image of my painting…or at least of what I managed so finish. There’s a bit of scattered reflection off of the brush strokes, but that’s to be expected with paint in such a range of dryness. I was able to get the hair roughly painted, finish the portrait, and work my way down the arm a little further. I am still working on a few chroma control issues, and will need a lot of practice before I am truly comfortable with this method of paint application, but I am beginning to get a feel for it’s potential.

The section of completed painting above represents around 14 hours of painting time…actually not all that bad considering the steep learning curve of the painting technique and the newly added concept of chroma (something I have been sort of dancing around for a few years but never really identified).

I will be posting a Grand Central Academy Summer Workshop wrap-up next week complete with final, well-lit photos of all three drawings and the painting, and my general impressions of the whole experience.

Stay tuned…

It is ridiculously late, so I will keep this update shot and sweet.  I spent the day working on the face and playing around with the chroma in a few little areas I had already finished. 

Only one day left.  Tomorrow I will try and finish the head and hair, and possibly work a little more on the arm. 

Now I’m off to bed.

I started the day off working on the shoulder. Things went much more smoothly than yesterday, especially chroma related decisions…and I realized early on that I would have to rework the neck and parts of the chest to bring up the chroma in a few areas. By the end of the day I started to get a little better at judging hues and chroma and things sped up a bit. I even managed to get some work done on the ribs. This method of painting takes a huge amount of concentration, and it’s surprising how mentally exhausted you feel after full day of it.

I’m having two canvas-related issues that I will be sure to address next time I paint a figure. The most annoying is the color of the toned canvas. It’s just the weirdest yellowish color, and it makes relating the flesh tones really confusing. I nice neutral ground such as I am used to using would be much better. I finally resorted to chopping in a little section of gray by the chest to keep me thinking straight. I am also having a little trouble with the dark lines from the charcoal transfer showing through the paint…particularly in areas with a lot of earth tones (which are relatively transparent) and not a lot of titanium white (which adds opacity). Doing the transfer with burnt umber would help with that issue, as would a simple under-painting. I’ll have to do a little experimenting with slightly different approaches once I get back to my studio.

Tomorrow: The face?

Today, after six days of careful prep work and research in the form of drawings and value study, I was finally able to start working on the actual painting. the day began with the mixing of the colors. I am already quite used to spending 30 to 40 minutes mixing a palette prior to beginning work on a specific area, but we took things in a slightly different direction today. First I mixed a string of neutral colors ranging from black to white. I added a touch of burnt umber and raw umber to the ivory black to kill its bluish tones before mixing it with titanium white to give the various values. Next, I mixed a string of yellows, a string of oranges and a string of reds, each ranging from darkest value to lightest in as full a chroma as possible. From these strings, I would then be able to easily mix a color at any value and at any range from yellow to red. By adding a neutral of the same value I could then drop the chroma from full intensity to lowest. Total color control…if a little on the complex side. Still, it beats a blind guess and then a lot of adjustment. Here is a shot of my palette at the end of the day:

The basic procedure was, in theory, extremely simple. For a given area to be painted, mix the lightest value and adjust it for hue and chroma. Next, mix the darkest value, again adjusting for hue and chroma. Then proceed in small increments from the darkest to lightest values, mixing first value, then hue, then chroma and applying each successively color to its proper place to render the form of the area being painted. In practice, the process proved to be more complicated. So much careful thought and analysis is required for each color decision. It took me a while to get a handle on it, but by halfway through the day it was getting easier. The hardest part was avoiding the urge to ‘cheat’ a little by blending colors together on the canvas to adjust for bad color decisions. the poster study proved to be invaluable as a reference to check the values of colors before applying them to the canvas. Below are two photos of today’s work. First, a shot of the whole canvas showing the poster study secured up in the corner for easy reference:

And second, a closeup of the area I was able to finish today. I ran a quick calculation, and once I account for the hour long lunch break, the five minute breaks for the model every twenty minutes and the two fifteen minute breaks (we call them long breaks…they seem interminable when you are in the zone), I estimate I have around four, maybe four and a half hours of actual painting time on any given day. I have three such days left before the end of the workshop.

Keep in mind, I haven’t made any attempt to color correct these images or to adjust their contrast/brightness. This is how the images came off the camera. There is, of course, some serious distortion both in the color range and in the contrast, but they give an OK idea of what is going on.

As always, more tomorrow.

So, here’s a shot of my little poster study. I spent roughly three and a half to four hours working on this 6 X 8 inch canvas, focusing less on proportion and detail, and more on placing a range of values accurately over the figure. Tomorrow, while I am working on the actual painting, slowly developing small areas at a time, I will be able to refer to this study to make certain I keep each area of the figure within it’s proper value range with respect to the overall scheme.

During the balance of the day, Doug began demonstrating the method we will use to apply color to the final figure paintings. For each tiny area of form, the color is carefully mixed first to the correct value, then tuned to the correct hue, and finally adjusted for it’s chroma (intensity of color on a range from neutral to pure color). The color basically goes onto the canvas exactly as it will be in the finished painting with almost no blending of any kind. If you have seen the surface finish of Doug’s or Jacob Collins’ paintings, you can imagine how meticulous the color application must be if they aren’t blending on the canvas. It’s pretty amazing. I am really looking forward to trying it out in the morning.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

This is just a quick update on the figure painting canvas.  Most of today was taken up with an extremely helpful, if condensed, lecture on color theory.  More on that later.  During the last two hours or so, Doug did a demo of the poster study we will be working on first thing Monday morning.  More on that later as well, once I have a chance to work on mine. For now, here are two images of my canvas after I toned it with a light wash of Burnt Umber and Ultramarine blue.  I wiped out the area of the figure a little more to help it stand out a bit, and also gave the entire canvas just the slightest gradation from the upper left to the lower right to help keep me thinking about the direction of the light.  This is the surface I will be working on for the final painting.

Here’s a closeup with a little better exposure:

More on Monday.

We did finally get around to transferring our drawings to canvas this afternoon, but first we had a few more hours with the model. I fixed an issue with the left pinky toe, fine tuned some musculature in the left forearm, refined the hair, adjusted the shadow line on the right foot, put in some cast shadow behind the hands and feet, and generally tightened up the entire drawing. this is how it looked just prior to transferring:

As I suspected, we used a charcoal transfer method that works something like carbon paper. First we took our drawings to a copy center and made a full size photocopy (most of us were working on really heavy vellum paper which wouldn’t have worked for this particular trick. Besides, we wanted to keep out drawings around for reference). The same thing could be done with tracing paper, but we are seriously pushed for time. We covered the back of the photocopy with charcoal, taped it down to our canvases, and then traced carefully over our drawings. The pressure transfers charcoal to the canvas. Easy-breezy. We even went so far as to lightly hatch over the shadow areas. Below is a shot of the canvas (18 X 24 inches) after the transfer.

Below is a close-up to show how detailed the transfer can be. It could be even tighter if I were to use a sharper tool to trace the drawing (I used a ball point pen). Try to ignore the blurriness at the top of the image. The glare on the canvas and the low-light were wreaking havoc with my camera’s auto-focus and image stabilization.

Tomorrow we will fix the drawing with a coat of fixative, then lightly tone the canvas with a wash of burnt umber and ultramarine blue to give a nice neutral surface color.

Doug also demonstrated an oil transfer method (it takes too long to dry to use during this brief, two-week workshop) that I will definitely be using on most future paintings. The procedure is basically the same, only burnt umber oil paint is dry brushed on the back of the drawing instead of charcoal. The huge bonus is that no foreign materials are introduced into the painting.  Also, the drawing will never show through the painting, there is no need to fix the drawing before painting and, the canvas can be toned before transferring the drawing allowing for the toned primer coat that I prefer to work on. Seriously cool stuff!

Last Saturday marked the last official day of the Summer Intensive drawing workshop. Originally, I would only have had another three hours with the figure drawing and six with the cast, but a few of us got together and hired our model for one last session on Saturday…giving me six hours on that drawing as well. Unfortunately, I don’t have final images of any of the three summer intensive drawings just yet. I just haven’t had the time during decent daylight to shoot any really good photos. But I will eventually get them posted.

Seriously.

What I do have is an image of the drawing I have been working on for the Figure Painting workshop that began Monday.

Doug began with a sort of orientation lecture and an overview of what we were going to try to accomplish over the two weeks of the workshop. He then sent all the students into the cast hall while he spent some time with the model working out a pose that not only would provide a good composition from as many vantage points as possible, but that the model would be able to hold with a reasonable amount of consistency for six hours a day (with breaks every 20 minutes of course). Then the ten of us drew numbers to decide in what order we would choose our spots around the model. I drew nine. Sometimes it is a serious advantage being a lefty. I was able to get a great spot with some lovely shadow/light interplay and a nice overall arc through the figure. The position just happened to be perfect for a left-handed artist but just a bit awkward for everyone else. You may wonder how in the world it could make any difference, but there are several handedness related issues that can make a big difference when working from a model. Most significant is the angle at which your easel is set up (Lefties look to the right of their easel at the model) and where the shadow of your drawing hand falls across your paper or canvas.

Once everyone was all set up, Doug began a demonstration that he will be carrying all the way through the end of the course. He drew for several hours, explaining his methods and taking questions. The last two hours of the day he turned us loose on our drawings. Tuesday began with another demo, though Doug encouraged us to work on our own drawings during the demo if we were comfortable with what we were doing (which I was). The goal has been to be ready to transfer our drawings to canvas on Thursday morning. Today was more work on the drawings, again with Doug demoing in the morning and walking around offering help and advice and answering questions in the afternoon. Below is my drawing as of this evening. The figure is roughly 18 inches tall, and I estimate I have put in around 12-13 hours of work.

Did you spot the arc? It runs through the left foot up the top of the right foot, along the back of the left arm, along the shadow line on the back of the neck and through the hairline. It’s almost a perfect circular section. You have to love it when things work out like that.

The drawing began with a block-in…just as in the drawing intensive…though we used a few different techniques. The next step was to carefully draw in the contours of the outside of the figure and the overlapping forms such as the left arm. Then we drew in the shadow terminator (basically the line between the areas receiving any light from the main light source and the shadows) and dropped in a light value to differentiate the lighted form and shadow. Finally we sought out a few shapes in both the light and shadow areas to map out some of the subtle sub-forms like abdominal musculature, tendons in the hands, facial features etc. All of this information will eventually be transfered to the canvas.

I am guessing that the transfer will be some variation on the charcoal transfer I have used before, but I’ll find out for certain tomorrow.

More soon.

The drawing intensive is almost over. With three and a half hours lest to work on the figure drawing and roughly six left on the cast, I’m slowly making progress on both.

With the figure, it’s down to a triage of what to work on for the final few poses and what to leave un-finished. My current plan it to try and get the face done, block in a rough value for the hair and, if possible, finish the right forearm.

Here is a close-up image of the torso:

I have more time with the cast drawing, and actually have a chance of finishing the modeling of the form. The question is whether I will have time to pull out the reflected light in the shadows.

I keep forgetting to bring my camera along to the studio at the GCA, but I have been plugging away meticulously at the newer cast drawing and the figure drawing.  Although I did get some photos this afternoon, I am having trouble capturing the subtlety of the drawings in the somewhat low light of the cast hall.  I have found that the most information remains intact if I make no adjustments to the images other than file size…so these are a little dark and yellow. 

This second cast drawing has been more of a challenge.  I am forcing myself to work in an extremely compressed value range by setting my darkest shadow value fairly light.  This means that the smallest nuances of value change have dramatic effects on the form of the drawing.  It is tricky, slow work, but it produces the most strikingly beautiful effects.  Nice airy shadows and full forms.  I have roughly 9 hours left to work on this piece.

As for the figure drawing, I kept the shadows there pretty light as well, though nowhere near as light as in the new cast drawing.  I am slowly making my way through the chest and abdomen, trying to capture as much of the subtle, intricate details of the anatomy possible without exaggerating anything.  With any luck, I hope to finish the torso, the right arm and the face before the intensive ends.