As many of you are aware, I spent the summer in New York attending two workshops at the Grand Central Academy. I thought it would be interesting and instructive to take on a small project in the vein of my more recent work, and execute it while adhering as closely as possible to the myriad of new techniques and ideas I was introduced to by Jacob Collins and his students. I found yet another lovely piece of scrap shot during the photo shoot for ‘The Letter’, and happened to have an alluringly blank 18X30 inch canvas on hand, and couldn’t resist. One of the most intriguing techniques Jacob employed during the Drawing Intensive was his method of creating a drawing from a live model. I didn’t have a live model available, but nearly everything he did is equally applicable to a good collection of photo reference. I started off with a loose block-in of the figure, ignoring the knowledge I had of what I was drawing, and focusing only on spatial relationships, relative sizes, an overall shape for the figure’s gesture, smaller shapes within the pose and how they fit into the overall ‘envelope’ of the larger shape. The image below illustrates this step in the drawing:
As I became more and more comfortable with the relationships between the general shapes that made up the figure, I began to refine the drawing. I constantly checked relative sizes, plumb and level lines that ran through the drawing and the relative tilts of angles that gave the pose its character and feeling. I was working on a very dense vellum paper, which allowed an almost unlimited amount of light sketching and erasing. This enabled me to use my eraser as an equally powerful tool alongside the pencil to slowly hone in on the final position of the lines that make up the drawing. This image shows the sketch at a halfway point between the block-in and the final drawing. Things still have room to move, but the form of the figure is starting to ompose itself over the abstract mess of the block-in sketch:
During the final stages of the drawing I began to focus on the details. At this point I was moving away from the abstract shape mode of the block-in and becoming increasingly aware of the physical form I was trying to represent on the paper. There was very little moving around of lines at this point, only constant refining. The image below is the final drawing of the figure, ready to transfer to the canvas.
I had a full size photocopy made of the above drawing for two reasons. One, the vellum paper was much too thick for me to use it directly in the oil transfer process I wanted to use to get the drawing onto the canvas. Two, the 18X24 paper didn’t allow me room to fully work out the composition of the background buildings. I spent some time working out the exact sizes, shapes and relationships of the buildings in the background, drawing on top of the photocopied image. Then I did the oil transfer. The canvas for this painting is an 18X30 linen canvas, which I stretched myself, sized with five coats of rabbit skin glue, locked in with two coats of acrylic primer, and then primed with two coats of white lead in oil tinted with burnt umber, ivory black and yellow ochre. To do the oil transfer, I lightly coated the back of the photocopied drawing with straight burnt umber. Then I taped the drawing securely to the canvas and carefully traced over the drawing with a red ballpoint pen (so I could tell easily where I had already traced). This process took nearly four hours. I was far from completely happy with the final results. There were areas that were so bled out and blurry as to be almost un-usable, but also areas that transferred perfectly. Later, as I closely evaluated the canvas, I discovered that the blurred areas were caused either by burnt umber too thickly applied to the drawing or by areas on the canvas where the oil priming coat was still a little soft. So the weakness in the transfer method had more to do with my inexperience than with the method itself. So, I will certainly keep working with it. The areas that transferred well were some of the most clear and perfect lines I have ever had on a canvas. In the end, the transferred drawing had more than enough information for me to use it for the final painting, so I decided to go with it. This image is a photo of the canvas just after the transfer:
The huge plus side of the oil transfer method is that, not only does it not introduce archivally unsound materials into the layers of the painting, but the burnt umber paint will never, even after decades, be able to penetrate the layers of oil color on top of it and eventually show through the finished image.
After two days, the burnt umber sketch was completely dry and ready to paint. I started with the face, using the yellow, orange, red, neutral color string palette layout demonstrated by Douglas Flynt. I made an incredible effort not to blend at all, but to carefully evaluate the hue, value and chroma of every brush stroke before laying it down in its exact place. I have to say, it worked rather well. The image below represents just over six hours of work on the face:
Incidentally, since your monitor size will determine how large these images appear, the face above is almost exactly 2 and 3/4 inches (roughly 7 cm) from the bottom of the chin to the top of the painted area of the forehead.
My next goal is to tackle the arms, which I should get to on Monday, provided Asher’s cough is just a minor cold and not something more serious. Fingers crossed.
