Here’s where I’m at on my Alice in Wonderland painting. I am happy with how it’s turning out…it’s going quickly too, which is refreshing. Every painting session so far has been really enjoyable and “productive”, without a lot of repainting stuff and frustration like many of my other paintings

Alice in Wonderland painting work in progress.

Since I have a deadline on this one I am making sure to paint every couple of days, I’ll be done with it in a couple weeks max.

Update:  this painting is done. To see the finished one and other Alice stuff, look at the Alice in Wonderland category.

Categories: Alice in Wonderland, art shows, oil painting, surreal, work-in-progress by Airn
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Although this is only my second blog post on this painting, I have been working on it for months and spending a good deal of time on it. I’m almost done…I hope to finish in a couple more sessions. Here’s my version of this Petrus Christus painting, generally referred to as “Portrait of a Young Lady” or similar:

Portrait of a Young Lady study - work in progress

The accursed decorative silver metalwork around the hat is the main thing I need to finish…it’s really caused me a lot of bother. I would have been done with this painting weeks ago but I keep “fixing” that part, I have painted over it several times now. I’ll write about it more when I post the final version, hopefully sooner rather than later!

*Update: For the completed painting see: http://www.chromaticblack.com/completed/petrus-christus-study-completed-portrait-of-a-young-lady

Categories: master study, oil painting, portrait, work-in-progress by Airn
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Here’s the progress I have made so far on my Alice painting…this is after 2 painting sessions.

Alice painting work in progress session 2

Working on canvas is refreshing…the 3 other paintings I am working on are all on panel, and although I enjoy some aspects of it, canvas is so much easier to blend on and such. The amount of progress I have made so far would not have been possible for me on panel. I’m also loving using yellow+black for the greens, it makes it really easy to match the shade if needed and to do shadows and highlights (just add more black/yellow). I also have a few different earth tones mixed in there too though to add variety.

Update:  this painting is done. To see the finished one and other Alice stuff, look at the Alice in Wonderland category.

Categories: Alice in Wonderland, oil painting, surreal, work-in-progress by Airn
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I’m usually working on 3 or 4 paintings at a time…here’s another one I started recently, a portrait of Brother Cadfael as played by Sir Derek Jacobi.

Brother Cadfael painting work in progress 05-26-09

It’s oil on panel, 8×10 inches. I am using a raw umber dead layer underpainting on this one, which I will glaze over later with color. At first it progressed really rapidly, but I keep altering the mouth; it’s been really tough to get it right! This should be a relatively quick painting though, since once underpainting is done I won’t have too much farther to go and there is no complex stuff like the metalwork on the pesky Petrus Christs study I am doing, which is driving me crazy.

I love the Cadfael series, and murder mysteries in general…I plan on doing a few other portraits of famous sleuths, including Nero Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) and maybe Sherlock Holmes (Jeremy Brett).

Update 07-11-09 – Here’s a much more recent version: Brother Cadfael – Sir Derek Jacobi work-in-progress 2

Categories: oil painting, portrait, work-in-progress by Airn
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I’m in the early stages of a new Alice in Wonderland project. It’s for a group show at the Muddy Waters cafe in Santa Barbara. The show is called Alice in Wonkaland…entries can be either related to Alice in Wonderland or Willie Wonka, or both! If you want more details on the show or if you’d like to submit something, please contact Traci Lane at this page on Myspace.

My own painting is going to be 11×14 inches, oil on canvas. I am going to paint direct this time, no monochromatic underpainting on this one.

Here’s a detail of the preliminary sketch:

Alice in Wonderland sketch - preliminary drawing for oil painting

I changed the drawing a little since that photo…thankfully I checked it in an 11×14 frame before transferring it to the canvas — I was not happy with the cropping and would have been very bummed later! I’ll post more photos once I get some paint down.

Update:  this painting is done. To see the finished one and other Alice stuff, look at the Alice in Wonderland category.

Oh, I think I am also going to submit a miniature oil painting portrait of Alice Pleasance Liddell, I’ll post a pic of that later…it looks too crummy right now to post

Categories: Alice in Wonderland, art shows, drawings, oil painting, surreal, work-in-progress by Airn
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A couple months ago decided I should take a bit of a break from my own original paintings and study some more old-master type paintings and drawings in order to learn.

Here’s one of the paintings I am working on, I started this in mid-February 2009. The original is by Petrus Christus and is referred to as Portrait of a Young Girl or Portrait of a Young Lady, etc. I’m painting it with oil on panel in an 11×14 inch size, although I think the original is closer to 8×10 inches:

Petrus Christus study work in progress

I found two fairly hi-res photos of this work, one is very cracked and the other seemed to have less cracks in it. After comparing the two though I realized that it just looks like they blurred one to remove the cracks, as well as cropped it, and the coloration and contrast is way different than the other and it’s even a bit rotated too! I now know that I need to seek out a bunch of photos of a famous piece of art since they can be wildly different.

Even though the drawing is pretty simple, it took a while to get her to look the same, she kept looking older in my version. The original is kinda odd, especially the nose and the right eye. I noticed that the original looks really strange when you look at it in a mirror. This is the first master-level painting that I have seen that looks weird when viewed in that way, every other one I have tried looks perfect in a mirror.

Partly because the original is so cracked and it’s hard to see some details, I am deviating in many respects from the original. I’m basically duplicating the form of the painting but partly in my own style. One thing that is awesome about this is that her gaze really follows you around the room, it’s rather eerie.

I did the face and skin in a raw umber dead layer underpainting first. Once I was satisfied with that, after many sessions and many hours, I started glazing transparent combinations of yellow ochre, burnt umber, and vermillion (hue) over the dry underpainting. The background was also painted with a few layers of glazed burnt sienna and burnt umber.

I still have a ways to go on this one. The decorative band around the hat has been very difficult, but I think I am close to figuring out how to do it.

*Update: For the completed painting see: http://www.chromaticblack.com/completed/petrus-christus-study-completed-portrait-of-a-young-lady

Categories: dead layer, master study, oil painting, portrait, work-in-progress by Airn
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I’ve been working on this painting since late November 2008, this is tentatively called Graveyard Girl From The Dream City and is oil on 11×14 inch panel.

For all posts about this painting, see the dream city category.

You can also jump to just the finished version here: graveyard-girl-from-the-dream-city-completed

Graveyard Girl from the Dream City (work in progress)

Detail view:

Graveyard Girl from the Dream City (detail) - work in progress

Planning, transferring the drawing, imprimatura

I initially wanted to paint something like a combination of my old painting Pigtail Gurl and Dream City in a larger format and with the idea that I can do a better job now that I have more experience. I wanted to experiment more with the “dead layer” technique too, especially after trying it with my Christmas Angel painting and having some success with it there. As I was planning it out the drawing got more complicated and the buildings and such ending up being a bit less weird than the Dream City, although I will still use a similar palette and the skyline and sky will be similar.

I used Poser software to create a model of the girl that I lit and posed as I had envisioned and then used that as I would a normal photo reference. I did the line drawing all in Photoshop, and then printed it out at Kinko’s. I also did some color study stuff in Photoshop. I used graphite transfer paper to get it on the panel (tracing over my printed-out drawing). This is the first time I’ve tried this technique and it worked well, but I dislike the overall process and aesthetic of digital art so on projects I have been going back to traditional media (pencil/paper/etc) for everything, including the planning and initial drawing. After recently looking at some Albrecht Dürer stuff I’m even more inspired to get better at drawing and to generally eschew digital techniques. I ended up changing the drawing considerably later, I will post that later as a comparison to the final painting.

I went over the drawing on the panel in sepia ink (ultra fine Sharpie) and put a thin wash of olive greenish color over everything (imprimatura) using Turpenoid, a little Galkyd Light, tiny bit of red ochre, yellow ochre light, and ivory black. It really didn’t need to be that complex…a couple times recently I have used a few transparent coats of acrylic, very thin to keep it smooth, just black and yellow, for an olive green color. The imprimatura is partly to wash away the graphite and seal the pen, and partly as a ground for the next layer since the panel I was using was too smooth and shiny. You can also let the brush strokes show through to add variety and texture, although in this one I didn’t do that. I made sure not to use too much turps as it will cause the paint to lose cohesion, that happened to me on my Two Mushrooms painting. Using Turpenoid in the paint is not my favorite thing, that’s another reason for me to use acrylic for the imprimatura.

Dead layer underpainting

With the girl’s face, I am again glazing over a raw umber dead layer underpainting. It is very nice to just focus on the tonal values and such without worrying about color initially.

My first session of underpainting for the face ended up being way too dark, partly cause I had a rather bright light on my easel and it was too close to the painting, duh. I’m getting better about physically stepping back from the painting a lot, moving the light around and viewing under other lights, looking at the painting in a mirror, upside down, etc. I also know from reading and my experience with “failed” glazing attempts that the underpainting should be rather lighter that desired for the final result, since I will be glazing onto the shadows as well as the lighter areas later, darkening most of it except the highlights.

Here’s a photo close to the end of the dead layer stage (although this was too dark!) and then a pic of the work-in-progress after I had glazed on some color:

Dead layer version of Graveyard Girl from the Dream City

In the first dead layer underpainting session I spent about 3 hours mostly on the face. I used raw umber and titanium white with no turpentine, oil, or other medium. I mixed up 4 shades on my palette and was happy at first to have a fairly nice reference (for a change) from my Poser rendering. Later I bemoaned the poser reference for the lack of realistic details, a real photo would have been superior.

I used several of the same-sized flat and filbert / tapered brushes so that I could use one for each value of umber…I painted all the darkest areas, then moved up in lightness and painted a bit wet-into-wet, doing a little blending afterward with clean dry brushes.

After that I spent several more sessions working on the face, lightening further and defining features, etc. It seems generally better to err on the side of it being too light rather than too dark…as long as you don’t lose the drawing and definition between elements, it’s easier to go back and darken shadows than to lighten everything up. It can take several sessions to cover up a dark area with light since I paint thinly, and it can look funky and chalky putting white over a darker color when the dark shows through.

Palette and glazing over the dead layer

I used cadmium yellow light (hue) + mars black for the greens so far, and have been using fairly fine bristle brushes a lot lately. Pthalho blue for water and sky, french ultramarine in the sky too. Clothing is prussian blue. For black I use mars and white is titanium.

The flesh tone glazing has been vermillion and yellow ochre with bleached linseed oil. Before I glaze I “oil out” the skin area by rubbing on the oil with my finger, letting it sit briefly and rubbing off the excess with a finger or very carefully with a paper towel. Dust has been a major issue with glazing, I constantly need to check for and remove dust from the painting as I am working on it. Storing the painting in between sessions face down carefully leaning against a wall helps. Dust on big brushes is probably the biggest culprit.

So far I have spent about 24 hours total painting this with another 10 or so drawing and planning.

The next post on this will probably be in a few weeks and will be the completed painting.

I am going to do a separate post later about what I have learned so far about glazing and using a dead layer.

Categories: dead layer, dream city, oil painting, painting tips, portrait, surreal, work-in-progress by Airn
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Update 04-08-09: I finished the Bouguereau painting, here’s the completed version.

Update 06-19-09: The Petrus Christus study is done too.

Here are a couple of the projects I am working on right now.

Both are based on masterworks, one is “A Calling” by Bouguereau, the other by Petrus Christus, a work referred to as “Portrait of a Young Girl” or “Portrait of a Lady”, etc. I’ll post more about them separately later, probably when I am done with each. I’m painting the Bouguereau direct on canvas, no underpainting, and the Petrus Christus one is on panel and I’m using a ‘dead layer’ monochromatic underpainting (raw umber and white). Fun!

Bouguereau and Petrus Christus studies

Categories: dead layer, master study, oil painting, work-in-progress by Airn
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Check out the category “dead layer” for more paintings using this technique.

This was my first serious try with using a monochromatic “dead layer” which was later glazed over with color. I’ve tried some glazing stuff before but I really had no idea what to do so it didn’t work out very well. This time I used the technique put forth by Alexei Antonov which uses 7 layers to (hopefully) yield a glowing painting that’s not physically possible to do without the transparent glazes. Plus “dead layer” sounds cool and is fun around Halloween, which is when I started this

Here’s the finished painting, this is “Two Mushrooms” by Airn LeBus, oil on panel, 10×8 inches, 2009:

Two Mushrooms dead layer oil painting

There are 3 free tutorials on artpapa.com, one of Antonov’s sites; I had to bounce back and forth between the apple and rose one and also peek at the forums and do other internet searching to feel more confident I understood what I was supposed to do. I still ended up being a bit confused and not sure if I was following the instructions correctly. Antonov’s paintings are really breathtaking by the way, I would certainly call him a modern master and feel comfortable taking his painting advice.

Here are 4 stages of this painting, including the shadow layer, dead layer, a later color layer stage, and the final painting which changed a bit from the initial plan:

Some of the Two Mushrooms painting stages

I deviated in what I hoped were unimportant ways from his tutorials and guidelines, including using panel rather than canvas, using Galkyd at one point and bleached linseed oils, etc…I think much of his technique is designed to yield paintings that will last for centuries, but for this painting that’s not my top priority, I just wanted to try glazing with step-by-step instructions.

Planning

I chose mushrooms as the subject of this painting for a few reasons: since the drawing could be simple and I could get to the actual painting quickly, because they are weird and cool, and because I was visualizing them looking great glazed so they are a bit luminous and glowing when the light bounces off the brighter underlayers through the transparent layers of color.

I looked at some pix of mushrooms on the internet and did some quick sketches of them, then did some little thumbnails and decided on the composition and perspective. I was in a rush to start the painting so I just slapped something together…that’s pretty much been the case with all my paintings except the very recent ones, I was just so eager to paint for the first year or so I just started the painting without much planning.

Imprimatura layer

I drew the mushrooms on the panel in pencil and then in sepia ink, I just used a Micron pen. I put a ton of Turpenoid for the 1st layer (“imprimatura”) and it didn’t bind properly…it had plenty of time to dry but came off the panel when touched with a finger. I then re-did the imprimatura with approx 50% Turpenoid and 50% bleached linseed oil…that time it worked better.

Shadow layers

Next layer in Antonov’s technique is the 1st shadow layer…I did this with just burnt umber, Galkyd Light, and linseed oil. It dried quickly to a enamel-like finish which was probably not ideal. FYI I don’t normally use Galkyd, but wanted this to dry extra fast. I believe the point of the shadow layer is more for archival reasons, in some other paintings I have started recently I skipped that layer and went from imprimatura to the dead layer.

I repeated the process as above for the second shadow layer. At that point I was still not really sure how I was going to do the ground area around the mushrooms, but I wanted it to be pitted and worn stone. Of course it would have been better if I had planned out everything first.

Dead layer

Next came the dead layer. I ended up doing this in several sessions, it ended up being more like two dead layers. Before starting I tried rubbing an onion on the panel as instructed in the Antonov how-to guides and “oiled out” with bleached linseed oil, which I normally use. In some of the sessions my color mixture was more olive in tone…I used yellow ochre light, red ochre, titanium white, and ivory black. It was a bit frustrating to be honest, I was concerned about keeping the paint thin and smooth so it would dry quickly and so there would not be rough spots later when I glazed over it…I also regretted the lack of planning since I wasn’t really sure what to do on the ground around the mushrooms. The dead layer also did not always offer the coverage I was expecting, which is one reason I said it was somewhat frustrating. Overall the paint just wasn’t responding the way I wanted it to, the enamel-smooth surface due to the Galkyd was probably the main factor. I have started two other paintings on panel since this one where I did a dead layer in raw umber and titanium white over an imprimatura (no shadow layer) and those went on nice and easy (Christmas Angel and Dream City Girl). With those I used some Turpenoid and oil in the imprimatura but then just a tiny bit of oil or no medium at all for the dead layer.

Color layers

In any case I wasn’t too happy with the results and decided to move on to the color layers…the dead layer part was not as complete as it probably should have been. I let this painting sit a couple weeks while I finished The Well III, Cracky-Chan, and Dream City #1, and then thought about what to do for this to make it better. I decided it would look cool and mesh well to include a thin layer of water so it looked like a pond or swampy area in which the mushrooms were growing. I tried to find some good reference photos on the web but didn’t come up with anything good…so I ended up just kind of guessing what it might look like.

I tried to “oil it out” but the oil just pooled on the smooth, enamel-like surface of the painting…rubbing an onion slice on the dried painting did seem to help the oil absorb in better. I rubbed it in with my finger and then wiped off the excess with a paper towel. I was glad that I used less toxic paints because I used my finger for blending a lot in this session…I was using titanium white and cadmium yellow light hue which I think is less toxic than cadmium paints, it doesn’t actually have any cadmium in it. A lot of painters have said flake i.e. lead white is crucial and that titanium white will not cut it…I don’t believe them yet

After I added a water droplet, darkened the background, started adding the swampy water effects, and added a layer of cadmium yellow light hue and more shading on the mushrooms I started to get much more excited about this painting…see the image in the lower left of the painting stages photo above.

More planning and major changes

I decided to let it dry a week or so before continuing, since I was not sure exactly how to add the water highlight / reflections for a swampy / murky look…there would be some trial and error and I wanted to be able to wipe off mistakes without affecting what I already put down. At this point it didn’t look like water so much as a mist hovering over the ground.

Since I wasn’t sure how to proceed I again tried looking at a bunch of paintings and photos of swampy areas but wasn’t able to find much. I imported a photo of the painting into Photoshop and spent a pretty good amount of time trying different things and finally came up with something that seemed OK.

I had realized from looking at some Bouguereau paintings containing water and stuff by other artists that the surrounding area was very important to clue the viewer in that it’s supposed to be water. I decided that having the whole painting covered in shallow water would not be as good as having a rock or earth edge to add contrast and further suggest to the viewer that these were mushrooms growing in a kind of swampy pond or deep puddle. Later I found a slightly similar pond area in real life to what I was trying to paint but photos and observation of it again weren’t very helpful. I’m often trying to create these very dark and dramatic lighting effects without a reference, so I’m just kind of guessing as I paint as to how it should look. I’m getting over the laziness and working more on learning what something might actually look like in that lighting, for instance I could have created a scene with some of the properties of what I was painting and lit it similarly in a dark room…in this case I guessed and that caused me some trouble. Of course it also makes sense to do studies and planning first for the tone of the painting, I’ve been doing that more in Photoshop lately so that the tougher-to-change oil painting does not need to be altered. In Antonov’s technique the shadow layer also helps plan that tonality out in monochrome so you can easily set up and alter the light and shadow areas of the painting.

I liked the way the rocks came together, they were pretty quick too and fun to paint. In the last couple sessions I glazed over most of the background and a lot of the water area with raw umber in a fair amount of bleached linseed oil, this really helped to unify stuff and overall helped the painting a lot. I added some yellow to the water droplet which was too white, added my signature, and finally decided I was done (about 3 months after I had started). I put a layer of retouching varnish over it a week or so after I finished it. In a year or so when the paint is completely dry I will use a final varnish.

It was really difficult to get a good photo of this one without glare, I finally took some pictures in the morning indirect sunlight that were good enough to use.

Categories: completed, dead layer, oil painting, painting tips, work-in-progress by Airn
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Here are the projects I am currently working on, I have not posted about any of these yet and felt like putting up some pix. I’ll do separate posts for each painting later too.

I am working on an oil painting for a portrait exchange with another artist, this is a digital version I did to plan the real oil version, I just finished it today. It took me a while to realize that the expression is kind of like the cracky-chan painting, but this is based on a photo so the similarity was not my doing The oil painting itself will be 11×14 inches, on canvas for a change (I mostly have been painting on panel).

Mishka portrait digital version

I’m also working on wrapping up this mushroom painting, which I have not posted about yet but have a big-ol draft post ready for when it’s done, since this was my first dead layer painting. This is oil on panel 8×10 inches:

mushrooms work in progress

I’m in the early stages for one that’s currently called “Dream City Girl”, I have the face painted so far but there is a bunch more in the painting and I am doing a bunch of Photoshop planning to figure out what to do with this, here is the face underpainting detail, oil on panel 11×14 inches:

dream city girl raw umber underpainting, work in progress (detail)

Finally, I’m still working on the angel painting which was in the last post, and another older small panel of a stern-looking angel or something, this is oil on panel 8×10 inches:

stern angel work in prog (detail)

Categories: oil painting, work-in-progress by Airn
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