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I suck. So I did a value study instead.

January 19, 2010 in Blogging, Creativity, Daily Painting, Editorials, Process, painting | No comments

In the process of painting, one comes to realize that it’s just not happening. That canvas is fighting you all the way. It’s taunting you. Calling you names. Dripping hot wax on your nipples and bustin’ out the hot pokers. Then it gets nasty. But we won’t go there.

What matters is that I just couldn’t seem to get anything to work in the painting I was working on today, which I can’t show you until the surprise is sprung. Anyway, I got pics and everything to show just how bad it got. Yes, I documented my shame. And I’m going to share it with you when I can (after Jan 31).

So… I persevered and kept at it and suddenly I realized I’d lost it. Not my mind; I lost that years ago. I lost the painting. It got away from me, a naked child running away and laughing. So I grabbed my palette knife and scraped the whole damned thing down, then rubbed it down with a turpentine-soaked paper towel.

I’ll teach you to run away, you little bastard!

Remember that I preserved the charcoal drawing with fixative, so I was essentially down to a toned canvas with my drawing. Square one, for all intents and purposes. Sigh.

I stood back and decided that I wasn’t going to admit defeat. Not me. Not today. I was going to do a value study. It was the color and the values that were getting the better of me. So I did the value study. And it came out great. But it’s in oil and I want to paint some more tomorrow night… so, um, I don’t know what to do with it now. No way it’ll be dry for about a month. I got a pic of it and I think I may chalk it up  to learning and move on. I have another canvas prepped but I decided to go bigger at the last moment.

The reference photo just isn’t working for me. It’s all browns – you can’t see any of the richness of the flesh, the underlying veins or rouge of the cheeks or any vibrancy in the shadows. So I’m struggling to basically paint a portrait in a series of yellows, oranges, and browns. LOTS of browns. And I don’t like it.

I might just throw caution to the wind and make the best of a bad reference photo by going hyper-creative and pushing an extreme coloring of the portrait. Or do something similar to my self-portrait series and go completely random and push my own style. I had wanted to do another really good, realistic portrait but I think I’m going to have to put that on the back burner because I don’t want to do a brown portrait.

Or, and this is an idea, I can tweak the value study with splotches of color here and there. Maybe draw a horizontal band and “colorize” that area. Hmm. That would work. And I’ve been itching to use some of my bench warmer paints. Hmm. I think I just helped myself figure out a solution. Thanks, self!

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Working on a secret portrait

January 16, 2010 in Blogging, Creativity, Daily Painting, Editorials, Materials, Process, Techniques, painting | 1 comment

I know it looks like I’m not doing as much here, what with the filling up of the space with crap out how it sucks to have a good painting. I know some people were like, “Yeah, I totally GET that,” while others were all, “Boo fucking hoo, jackass.” Cie la vie.

It remains that it IS hard to follow up. I suspect much of a book I’ve been meaning to get, Art and Fear, is about this very subject. I’ll probably read it and be thinking in my head the whole time, “Yeah, yup, uh huh, totally, exactly, YEAH, that’s me,” on and on. It’s a good ego stroke. And if there’s something I like, it’s to be stroked.

So, anyway, I do have something to say that actually ties in to the title of this post. I’m working on another portrait, but I can’t reveal it. Though the recipient, I guarantee, won’t come here… I suppose I can wait. Thought I don’t like to not have regular posts.

So far, I’ve done my color study in The GIMP (Photoshop-like app for Linux), I’ve done a charcoal drawing, and I went a little further with this one and something I’m trying to see if I can get my on-demand drawing skills back up to where they used to be.

(Back when I was in the Navy and single and bored and living in the barracks, I drew. And drew. And drew! It got to where I could whip out any ‘ol picture and make a really good drawing/likeness – in PEN – in the first pass. Those were the days of drawing for hours each day. Those were days that are looooooong gone.)

Instead of doing the drawing from my computer screen (how do YOU do commissions when all you get is a JPG?), I printed it out on my laser printer. I like to use it because it’s black and white and lets me do my drawing without the distraction of color. Oh, and color laser printers are farking expensive.

So, anyway, I tells Maude, ya see, that Doris told me that Ethel tells her that she overheard Frankie and he said…

Oh, sorry. I like to ramble at times.

I did a charcoal drawing directly on the canvas, trying to match the size of the printout exactly. Then, using tracing paper, I traced the printout and laid it over my charcoal drawing. Hmmm, I was pretty close on most things, but was off on a few key things – one of the eyes, the angle of the nose, and the neck line. But I was pretty close overall, and mostly pleased with myself.

[stops for applause, takes a bow]

Charcoal, in case you don’t know, comes off the canvas in a stiff breeze, unlike graphite (your trusty #2 pencil for you non-artists). I use a paper towel and it wipes right off. So I twisted the paper towel and selectively erased some parts and came back in with the vine charcoal and gave it another go. Then replaced the tracing paper to see how well I did. I got everything but one eye this time. Back at it again and I think I got it nailed.

I think this method keeps me honest in my drawing skills but also lets me quickly troubleshoot problem areas.

And, in all honesty, the first time I came through with the tracing paper I ended up wiping the charcoal off of the ENTIRE CANVAS. Ouch. It was that bad. The next time through, I relied less on measuring and more on just looking, feeling. Use the Force, Luke!

A coat of fixative to secure the charcoal in place and we’re set for a first layer of paint.

After the reveal, I’ll upload the process pics (yes, I have process pics!).

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A novel approach

January 8, 2010 in Blogging, Daily Painting, Process, painting | 2 comments

Well, not really. I don’t have an approach. But I’m prepping 2 canvases tonight. I have a couple of paintings to finish tonight.

I’m told… well, I’m told but I don’t always listen to what I’m told.. that I should paint every day. Every single goddamned day. You know, like, daily and stuff. So I’m going to try. Though I’m telling you it’s hard. It’s really hard. But I want so badly to start selling my work that I have to run through my first 100 bad paintings before I start getting to the good stuff. And at about 10 paintings each month, that’s damned near the whole year.

Hey, I rhymed.

So here goes. I’m posting the ref photos even though it bugs the crap out of me to do it. Because then I’m ON THE HOOK, man. I’m freakin’ on the hook. [sigh]

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Steve Husted: portrait artist?

December 30, 2009 in Creativity, Daily Painting, Process, exercise, painting | 14 comments

HOLY CRAP this was a hard painting to do. I spent a little over 3 hours just on the oil painting. That’s more time than I’ve spent on any one painting since I started painting again in September.

Phew!

This portrait is of Rajashree Raghavendra, and is for the Different Strokes for Different Folks (DSFDF) painting challenge blog that Karin Jurick hosts. It’s a lot of fun and very challenging and, for me, can be pretty stressful. She painted me.

By the way, I should say that, yes, I am available for commissions if you so happen to see this painting and think you’d like to have one done for you or a loved one. Or a despised one; makes no diff to me.

I was going to take a bunch of pictures as I went through the process but I got sucked into the painting and next thing you know, it’s 10:40pm and the wife is headin’ off to bed and I’ve still got at least an hour of work to do.

Here’s the reference photo and my painting. Please note that I tweaked the ref photo for brightness and contrast and saturation a bit. It was dark when I got it. Also note that my painting was photographed in my kitchen under fluorescent lights (it is just about midnight so I’ll have to get the full sunlit painting tomorrow, hoping the weather permits) so it’s not really representative of the work (it’s brighter than this). Edit: got a picture outside – it’s overcast but the colors are definitely coser to reality. Not exactly, but pretty close.

PORTRAITraj_portrait_dsfdf

Okay, okay, enough blathering, here’s the process for this painting:

  • Started with drawing in graphite pencil, made it permanent with fixative
  • Came in with the gray background and outlined the face and laid in the major landmarks
  • Came in with darkest darks (always scary at this point!)
  • tried mixing up the darkest flesh tones – took me probably 5 puddles of paint before I got color/value I liked
  • laid in the dark flesh tones, followed by the mids, and came back through with the lights (bright yellow, not pure white)
  • Worried over the mouth. I ended up getting it pretty good. Note: I don’t paint teeth. I paint a grayish yellow area with a darker shadow and a black line at the top
  • Freaked out over the eyes, so I blobbed some black outlines, black pupils, and dark gray “whites” to set it in. Left it at that for a while
  • Came back through to get the reflected lights. Could have done better on the nose but the paint wasn’t agreeing with me. I need better brushes.
  • Scarf/hair laid in
  • Used a palette knife (the sharp edge) to scratch in some gray hairs. Sorry, Raja, but they’re there so I put ‘em in!
  • Re-did the glasses shadow like 4 times. It’s a purplish pink flesh tone and was hard to get. I ended up adding some Burnt Sienna to get it to look right in the painting
  • Worked on the eyes like a freak
  • Decided to go with an “unfinished” look. I like that look. Also wanted to include some blue in the shirt for unity (there’s blue in the hair and a touch of green in some of the flesh to “gray” out the red)
  • The part in the hair gave me some trouble but I think I nailed it
  • Finished the eyes. Again.
  • Came through with some highlights and a smaller brush
  • More eye work
  • Used the palette knife to suggest glasses rims – a black line and a gray line, top and bottom
  • MORE eye work – reworked most of the eyes and liked them better
  • Reworked the neck to make it darker and to add the single brush stroke for the entire lit side (I like when I can get something done in a single stroke… of course, it took like 8 strokes before that one to get the right color/tone)
  • Finishing touches, ensuring I didn’t miss anything
  • Finished up eyes with highlights on lower lids and “alive” highlight on pupil
  • Put the earrings in (they’re grey, believe it or not)
  • Done!

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Portrait challenge – graphite under-drawing

December 29, 2009 in Daily Painting, Process, painting | 1 comment

I took my last charcoal drawing and overlaid it on the original photograph. My drawing was off in a couple of ways:

  • I didn’t make her face wide enough
  • I didn’t make her lower lip and chin large enough

Other than that, the right-hand side (as you’re looking at it, not HER right-hand side) was dead-on. Not bad since I haven’t done a portrait in years. Anyway, I fixed it by getting some landmarks placed correctly and re-drawing it directly on the canvas with an HB pencil, sprayed it with fixative and it’s drying as I type this.

dsfdf_portrait_canvas_prep

I emphasized the darkest points and some landmarks so that they’d show through as I painted. Once I did that, I filled in some darker shadows so I could be sure I got the bottom of the chin in the right spot and I proceeded to draw in the eyes, nose, and mouth. I pretty much kept the hair the way the charcoal drawing was.

Her right eye (her right, not your right) isn’t really that droopy – she has dark make-up under her eye (well, either that or some REALLY dark skin and really thick lashes) – my pencil was getting dull from the shading work on the canvas. In case you’ve never used a pencil on canvas, I can tell you that the texture of the canvas really wears down your pencil in no time flat. And stuff.

I offset her on the canvas to make the composition interesting. I’m considering doing an “unfinished” look to the surrounding features and background, a la much of the work of John Howard Sanden- yeah, right, as if I could pull THAT off. I’ll be happy if this doesn’t look like a paint-by-numbers or like I’m some sort of hack. Well, I AM a hack, just that I try not to let that get out too often.

Truth be told, I’m afraid to do this. What if I screw it up? What if I can’t get the values right? Or the colors? Or the background doesn’t recede properly? Or I don’t finish in time. I’ve got tonight and tomorrow to finish this or I’ve missed a deadline I’ve committed to. And I can’t let that happen. And I’m afraid to ruin this thing. Oh, well, only one thing to do… the copyrighted “break the toy” phrase to the rescue!

Self portrait #4

November 12, 2009 in Art Every Day Month, Blogging, Creativity, Daily Painting, Ideas, Process, painting | No comments

Self portrait #4, 11″ x 14″, oil on canvas board, preliminary drawing, WIP

self_portrait_4

I had a painting I had done about 2 years ago when my son was 2. It was just me and him messing around. Mostly me trying to keep oil paints out of a 2 year old’s eyes and mouth. It began life as a terrible self-portrait so I intentionally ruined it with my kid. I scrubbed the canvas and then I sanded it down. Oil paint isn’t the best sanded material, in case you’re wondering. So I decided to go over it with a dark, dark brown. It’s been that way for 2 months. I have 2 other self-portraits prepared, but I’ve lost the muse on them. I might just paint over them.

So it goes.

I took a picture of myself with my digital camera, cropped it and shrunk it to fit the 11″ x 14″ canvas, and modified it in The GIMP (Photoshop-like clone for Linux) with the “photocopy” filter. That basically takes it down to an outlined drawing. Then I opened OpenOffice Presenter (PowerPoint clone) and made a 1-pager with a portrait orientation and a size to match the canvas. I dragged my image onto it, printed at actual size (my printer only does 8.5″ x 11″, so it printed 3 sheets’ worth), I traced the details I was concerned with onto tracing paper, rubbed white conte crayon onto the back, and then re-traced over the tracing paper to transfer the image to the canvas.

Next, I’ll spray it with fixative to make sure the conte crayon drawing doesn’t smudge. Then it’s ready for painting.

I haven’t decided how to paint this yet. I’m thinking that I should keep it dark. And drippy. And maybe lace in some wording/verbiage as it comes to me. I might just pull out enough lights to make it recognizable, attack it with thinner, pull out some more lights, and thrash with thinner again. I liked the effect I got yesterday so I want to get to it before it makes me want to pound nails through it. Hmm, now THERE’S an idea…

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Nagelesque

November 10, 2009 in Art Every Day Month, Blogging, Creativity, Daily Painting, Editorials, Process, painting | No comments

Update: here’s the picture:

“Nagelesque,” 9″ x 11″, oil on canvas board, NFS (this baby’s a keeper!)

nagelesque

I finished my “Nagelesque” painting last night. I decided to do some experiementing – I used my typical restricted palette (Cad Yellow Light, Alizarin Crimson, French Ultramarine, Burnt Umber, Titanium White) and I did a quick undercoating with a #10 brush… then decided I didn’t like that so I came back through with a palette knife for the rest of it. Thick, impasto painting.

To do this, I had to mix up a lot of paint to start out with, which is something I don’t normally do.  That was good for me. The first time, with the light purple, I didn’t mix up enough and had to mix more, so that sort of forced me to be able to duplicate my results. Which isn’t as easy as it sounds.

I decided to skip the underpainting, which I think was a mistake. I wanted the skin to be whitest white… so I left it unpainted. I wanted to see how that worked. Well, lemme tell ya, with no underpainting, the fine black outlining was tough because it didn’t flow, it stuck on the canvas’ rough texture. I had issues with a consistent line quality and came away a bit frustrated. Lesson learned – do the underpainting.

I didn’t take a picture of the completed piece last night – it was getting late and I was tired, and I’d really like to get some natural light on it because I’m tired of yellow and dark and non-representative images of my paintings. Ugh.

I also prepped another canvas with a more brownish mixture of Payne’s Gray (my own mixture). I’ve got 4 prepped canvases now. Quite honestly, I’m once again at the fear point of “oh, FSM, what if I ruin the drawing and underpainting?” that paralyzes me and makes me procrastinate on doing them at all. I need to remember: Break the Toy (TM).

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Bent

November 3, 2009 in Art Every Day Month, Creativity, Daily Painting, Process, painting | No comments

“Bent,” 9″ x 12″, oil on canvas board, $300

bent

“Sometimes you have to break the toy.”

He said that as he was smashing something of his that he really liked. He wasn’t talking to me, he was talking to my friend, Derek, the same guy whose wife blew his head clean off with a shotgun. Different story. Anyway, Derek laughed and I didn’t really get it at the time. I wonder if Derek was laughing because the guy was crazy or if he thought it was really funny.

The moral still holds true: sometimes you have to break the toy. I get it now.

I got this idea for a painting while watching Helvetica and I sketched out a thumbnail over the weekend: a painting split at the Fibonacci point with the top half blue, tainted/dulled with a wee dab of orange, and orange on the bottom, turned rusty/dirty with a wee spot of blue. The word, “Bent,” HAD to appear across the horizontal line and HAD to stretch off the edges. Sometimes I don’t know why they come to me, these ideas just DO. Okay?

Today, as I was prepping to continue my last 2 paintings in the self-portrait series, I flipped over a canvas board and found this really old self-portrait I had begun YEARS ago. The drawing was good in a technical sense but lacked emotion. Vivacity. So I thought to myself, “Self, why not do that blue and rust thing right over this old self-portrait?”

Then, devilishly, I continued, “BREAK THE TOY.”

Bwa ha ha ha!

I broke it. I borked it. I smashed it into little bits. I covered it up in thick paint then rubbed it back out again and left the canvas raw and the paint rough and the strokes mish-mashy and every which way, and I threw in a thought that I couldn’t dismiss as I was painting: “My, you’re a dirty little boy, aren’t you?” Mmm, yes, deliciously dirty.

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I Reject This, WIP

November 2, 2009 in Art Every Day Month, Creativity, painting, writing | No comments

“I Reject This,” 11″ x 14″, oil on canvas board, WIP

i_reject_this_underpaintingi_reject_this_canvas_drawing

There’s a powerful moment when I ride my motorcycle, when the man-machine connection swells up and washes it all away, when I am. When I just fucking am. I arrive and put on the mask. I reject this.

There’s a part of me that does it because I must. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to. There’s a part of you that I see and I think as I narrow my eyes at you, “Liar.” There’s an inner monologue that just won’t quit. There’s a little bit of it that I wish I could just turn off. The nag chooses me and I begin to melt into the mould. I reject this.

I look across and see the danger and the white triangle consumes my thoughts. I push it down. I reject it. I reject this.

I see what you’re doing. I hear it in your voice but I go on like I didn’t notice. I see the sacred path unfolding. I hear the “musts” and “shouldn’ts” and I hear you whisper, “Conform.” I reject this.

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Falling, WIP

November 1, 2009 in Art Every Day Month, Creativity, Daily Painting, painting, writing | No comments

“Falling,” 11″ x 14″, oil on canvas board, WIP

falling_tonefalling_drawing_canvas

The fire burns cleanly when it’s hot. But looks can be deceiving. That’s why, just when you think you’ve got your shit figured out, that god-forsaken deck of cards comes tumbling down around you.

Only thing is, most of the time, for all your stalwart appearances, nobody notices. You quietly control the countenance. Just enough so you’re allowed to be alone in your inner fire. Just enough so it’s only you that knows you’re falling.

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