An older painting continued

I was already about to throw this painting away, because it was started with the wrong colors, but then I thought why not give it at least a try. If the colors (W&N Artisan) are going to crack, I can still throw it away, if not, maybe it turns out nicely.

If my memory doesn’t fail me I remember having read somewhere in the Artisan spreadsheets that those colors weren’t suitable for glazing techniques. I cannot remember the exact reason why, but my best guess would be because their whites could be made with safflower oil? Well anyway, since I’m a curious person and would like to see myself what will happen I decided to give it a try nevertheless.

This is my underpainting, it has been touch dry for a couple of days and tonight I’m going to start with the first few glazes.

copy after Bouguereau, WIP, oil on canvas

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Two more orchids

Oh my, I haven’t posted much the last two months. Excuses for that.

Even worse: I have not drawn or painted one single stroke the last couple of weeks. I seriously need to get back to it.

Yesterday I stumbled upon an old acrylic painting. It was my very first attempt to paint in transparent layers. I wasn’t that happy with the result, but it was something different. Actually I liked the grisaille. Perhaps I should have left it in greyscale and not try to achieve a colorful image :).

Here is the WIP, step by step.

PS: The backgroundcolor is a dark green (not black), these pics were taken with my old camera which wasn’t as good in capturing subtle shades of color.

Oil pastel painting WIP start to finish

Today is a big day – it’s my blog’s 1st birthday. Yet instead of a piece of cake I will offer you a tiny oil pastel tutorial. Enjoy!

The painting shown here was done for the February 2008 Oil Pastel Challenge on WetCanvas. Thank you very much Angela for this beautiful shot!

The first thing I need to know before starting a painting is the composition. In this case I decided to put this little horse into a nightly landscape and in order to show more of the night sky I decided to work on a vertical format.

I know that there are plenty of artists out there who can start painting right away and will always get a gorgeous result, but I need to have made up my mind completely before I can start to paint. I need to see the finished piece clearly in front of my inner eyes.

The photo above shows you how I usually start the paintings: I transfer the most important lines using either charcoal or white chalk, depending on the color of my support. No details for me at this stage.

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Next step is choosing the right colors for this painting. I’ve made a color chart for that purpose, since one cannot always tell the color from looking at the pastel itself.

There’s really no need to choose the same colors as in your ref picture, just make sure, that you choose corresponding values and that the colors you choose match well together. Most of my paintings have stong complementary contrasts, but not all of them. This one here is almost monochromatic as one usually does not perceive colors by night (without artificial lighting).

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That’s what I came up with. Basically 3 colors: pale yellows, light pinks and two blues. The olive green is just meant for adding some darker accents where necessary.

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Next step is blocking in the main colors of the background. I always start with the background that makes it so much easier to find the right color and value for the main subject. And as you will notice, too, when looking at the upper left corner I also start blending the OPs almost immediately as I like a smooth and even surface, almost like an oil painting.

That’s what the painting looks like after having blended all the colors in the background. Now I can start working on the horse. I decided to leave the dark color of the background as the darkest value on the horse and just added lighter colors where necessary and this was the result:

Now the painting is almost done and it’s about time to decide how detailed the final work shall be. In the end I decided that the painting is basically finished as it is. All I did was adding some stars to the night sky and adjusting some values on the horse. The actual color of the finished painting is somewhere in the middle between the two photos (the one above and the one beneath these lines.)

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“As the moon began to fade the stars became visible”

oil pastel on pastelboard

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By the way, the stars you can see in this painting are the constellations Phoenix, Pisces, Aquarius and Pegasus, of course ;-)).

Oil Pastel: Portrait of a girl (finished)

As other things keep me quite busy I do not have much time for painting at the moment. So I am very glad that I had a spare moment to finish this portrait. Of course there are still little things that could be improved, but I’m ready to leave it the way it looks now, too.

On to the next painting :)!

Waterlily lake – finished

Finishing this piece was quite tough for me, since things didn’t work out quite the way they were expected to. I do admit that it was my fault, I should have sticked to the values I established in my underpainting, but I always like to do changes along the way when I start painting. Most of the times this my procedure works well, but sometimes it doesn’t. Don’t even ask me how many layers of color I’ve added to this painting trying to correct it here a little bit and there a little bit. (Let’s just say by far too many :).  ) Now I decided that it would be better to leave it alone the way it is now, for it can only get worse.