Angel work in progress 2 (oil on panel)

This is the first time I have glazed flesh tone over an underpainting and I like the way it’s working out! The above pic has 3 layers of color on it over the raw umber “dead layer”.

After the underpainting was done (although I kinda wish I had worked on it a bit longer) I took a photo and experimented in Photoshop, especially to figure out the background color, wing colors, and how it would look in the frame it will be going into with different schemes. I have been doing that sort of planning a lot lately with several new paintings…it’s absolutely invaluable! I can try anything and not have to worry about screwing up the actual painting. I have an old Wacom tablet I use for that purpose. It’s fun doing virtual glazing over the underpainting with transparent colors and works better than I would have thought

For the flesh tone I am using vermillion and yellow ochre over the raw umber. I am keeping all layers very thin and not rushing it. I added some yellow ochre and vermillion to the clothing shadows too. Colors used for wings and jewels are cad yellow light hue, viridian+yellow, vermillion, prussian blue, phthalo+permanent rose. Eyes are cobalt blue so far. I am just using bleached linseed oil for the medium, very thin layers, and lightly ‘oiling out’ before applying the glazes. I believe that the thinness of the layers will prevent any sort of cracking or other nasty problems. Using turps or other mediums like galkyd have yielded funky results for me, I am not using turpenoid for anything (oh except the imprimatura-ish layer) at this point, not even to clean brushes anymore…I just use bar soap after a session to see if my brushes will survive better that way. Actually they have been a lasting pretty long time nowadays anyway, they used to get thrashed really fast but that was when I was leaving them bristle-down in a tub of turps whilst painting and trying to clean them and use for other colors, ugh not a good practice! Now I keep at least one separate brush for each color and one for darker raw umber+white mix, one for lighter, etc. I end up using a boatload of brushes in a session on this angel though, like 15 brushes or something crazy this last session, since there are a lot of colors and some are used for shading and blending.

Palette of colors for my angel painting

Those are the colors with which I have been glazing my angel painting.

Christmas Angel painting work in progress

Update 12-21-08: Underpainting done I think, and started on the hair and crown:

Christmas Angel work in progress 12-21-08

After the underpainting is done and dry enough, I will try glazing thin layers of transparent color over it. The hair, background, and gold crown will be direct painting with no underpainting. I have met with limited success glazing previously, so I am working hard to ensure this will be successful after all the time spent drawing and on the underpainting. I’m keeping the paint as smooth and flat as possible and making it lighter than the intended result since the glazing will darken it.

It’s really nice to work in monochrome in order to just focus on the tone and such and not have to worry about color yet! It’s not likely this will be done by Christmas but I should be fairly close if all goes as planned.

I like how this one is going so far, it’s oil on 8×10 inch Gessobord panel and the texture is nice, like an eggshell…much better than the other panel I have used that was way too smooth so paint barely adhered. This is much more toothy and kind of absorbent and so far all the painting I have done has just been feeling right, much better than past projects like my Cracky-Chan one where I was fighting the painting most of the time. The Gessobord, keeping the paint smooth, painting in just one color, and waiting until dry enough before additions are primary reasons for that I think. Going over semi-dried oil paint, especially if the under layers are rather thick, tends to cause major frustration and poor results from what I have seen. If needed I will try scraping this smooth with a razor blade (rounded edges, filed down), so the glazing does not build up or pool over uneven areas…although on the fabric that could be a desirable effect!

Oh, FYI the reason the background is yellowish is I transferred the drawing onto the panel with graphite paper, went over it in sepia ink, then did an imprimatura wash with ivory black and yellow ochre light. Once that dried I started the raw umber part.

I finished my Dream City #1 painting after many months and a plethora of major revisions…paint over a building here, add a channel of glowing water there, slap in an Eye of Horus here, a tombstone there…

Dream City #1, oil on canvas board, 14x18 inches, 2008

Really happy with the frame I had made for this one. I got it at Craft Essentials in Goleta…the color and distressed texture look great with the painting and I think the gold design around the edge fits well with the Egyptian motif.

I compiled some of the various stages and revisions this went through…it looks so much different now than the initial sketch and early versions!

Early versions of Dream City #1

Later versions of Dream City #1

Definitely going to do another Dream City, next time I will plan it better and do it on smooth panel rather than canvas so I can do details better…it was rough to try smaller details with the heavy canvas texture. Much like the Cracky-Chan painting, I have been working on this so long I have become a better painter whilst working on different paintings in the interim, so when I came back to this one it was tempting to try to “fix” a ton of stuff that I think I could do “better” now. I generally resisted that urge, although I did modify some buildings and clouds/smoke/fog and water and such on my final night of painting this, 11/05/08. It always takes me at least a week to post a finished painting cause I let it dry a while then put retouching varnish before I take a picture.

Overall I am happy with the look and feeling of this painting; my three favorites I have done so far are this one, The Well III, and Jovial Jack O’ Lantern. The next painting I will start is related…another odd girl kinda like Pigtail Gurl but I want to include part of this cityscape behind her so that she is sitting for the portrait in the Dream City.

Cracky-Chan, oil on panel, 8x10 inches, 2008

I’m pretty happy with this painting when I look at it in real life, however when I look at these photos of it, it’s much easier to see some of the overall issues that aren’t as apparent when you are only a couple feet away from it. When it’s condensed way down it looks different, it’s also darker in real life then what you see in the picture…anyway it looks better in real life, I swear

a bit larger than life-size detail

I have learned many strange and wonderous things whilst on this dark and disturbing journey…mostly that it sucks to try to paint something in this semi-realisitic style without planning everything out properly beforehand and when you are a beginner I also didn’t step back enough and notice overall issues but was focusing too much on details and textures and such. Although I think the main problem here is that I didn’t plan it out beforehand well enough, many of the issues I encountered couldn’t really be avoided without having more experience…this was a learning process, that was one of the main points of this painting. I worked on this for so long too that it’s like some of my skill improved and left this painting behind…I mean I was working on, and finished, many paintings while this was still being worked on concurrently, so I would return to this and notice things that I could do better now, but it’s sort of too late now on this one…I have completely sanded out and painted over eyes, moved one, repainted it, sanded it down again, totally changed the necklace 3 times, the hair took many wildly different tries, etc etc etc…time to wrap up Ms. Cracky-Chan, varnish it, and finally be done. Oh that’s another thing too, after spending crazy amounts of time on something I wanted to make sure I was as happy as possible with the painting, it’s a fine line between excessive amounts of time and ensuring that you have given it your best try and not given up or been lazy at the end after all that time and effort. I ended up feeling kind of unhappy with the end result, but mostly just when I look at these computer images of it, when it’s on the wall in my house I’m fairly satisfied.

I had a bunch of problems towards the end trying to make small changes to the dry painting, where it looked OK until the changes dried and then they didn’t match the surrounding areas. I “oiled out” the painting by rubbing linseed oil into it before one of these final changes and although it seemed to help the new paint blend in to the dry parts, when it dried sometimes it was more screwed up looking than before I made the corrections

Colors used and notes (titanium white used in pretty much every section as well) :

Background: initially a chromatic black mixture of raw umber and some kind of blue (french ultramarine?), later ivory or lamp black with alizarin crimson and some white / raw umber or if I had skin tone mixed up I put some of that into the background so it was not a solid black.

Skin tone: raw umber / perm alizarin crimson. I didn’t use any yellow in this mix partly to fit with the style of the ref photo which was very red and also so it wasn’t too difficult to re-mix the same shades later, my paint dries out pretty much overnight so each session I usually have to re-mix the colors…I keep notes and such to help with this. For the red nose and such I used vermilion and a cadmium red along with alizarin crimson.

Necklace: raw and burnt umber, yellow ochre. Jewels were alizarin crimson and cad yellow light.

Eyes: Changed a lot so not sure but I think cobalt and cerrulean.

Hair: It took me SO many tries to get the hair to where I am mostly happy with it. The latest layers are yellow ochre, burnt umber, indian red, raw umber, burnt sienna, maybe some cadmium yellow light (hue). The brushes were the most important part for this, I used a spayed out liner for much of the details and coarse bristle brushes…I also have this one weird small flat shader that works really well for hair ’cause it shows brushstrokes which become individual hairs.

Shirt thingy: burnt sienna, cad yellow light, raw umber, lamp black.

The Well III oil painting by Airn LeBus, oil on panel 9x9 inches, 2008

I think maybe this is the best painting I have done so far overall, and it was one of the fastest to complete! I didn’t have to make very many revisions even though it wasn’t planned out at all…although I sort of based this on other drawings I have done I didn’t sketch this out beforehand, just started painting and went with the flow. I am happy with this one and want to do more creepy landscape type scenes, I’m loving the creepy night scenes.

Noche De Los Muertos
Muddy Waters Cafe
508 E. Haley St., Santa Barbara, California
(805) 966-9328

The reception for the show is Oct 18th at 7PM, all ages, or go by Muddy Waters any time this month to see all the spooky art!

Flyer:

Anyway, due to that snafu I’ve changed the whole way that images are integrated here and most of the image URLs will be different now, although all the images still exist.

I have created a simple gallery for completed works that you can get to from the side link to the right or here:

To view all completed paintings, go to the Completed paintings gallery.

If you want to see all the works in progress for a specific painting just click on the correct category, for instance if you want to see all the Dream-City ones just click on that category on the right hand side or below any Dream-City post. You will then see all posts and you can click the images for bigger versions…but I won’t have all the work-in-progress images in a gallery at this point. Later I will create galleries like  “all cracky works in progress” etc.

If you spot anything that seems broken please let me know with a comment, thanks!

Update 11-02-08: The Well III is done, go here to see the finished painting.

The Well III, oil on panel, 9x9 inches, work in progress 09-28-08

This painting is inspired partly by H.P. Lovecraft’s writings and his Cthulhu Mythos. It’s a kind of sequel to a couple watercolor illustrations I did and also a companion piece to my dark and creepy Lovecraftian song The Well.

I finished my Jovial Jack O’ Lantern painting directly before this and picked up some new techniques for painting grim grass, forbidding flora, slimy stone, and other such goodness. This is a rather small painting so I wasn’t able to cram in any tombstones or anything but I’m excited about the overall look and feel of the painting, there’s something super creepy and cool about steaming swamps and weird glowing mushrooms. I’m starting to figure out what I like painting the most: creepy night scenes with fog and smoke and lots of glowing stuff (like Dream City #1 and Jovial Jack O’ Lantern :B).

Cracky Chan work in progress 09-24-08

This painting has come a long way, if you saw my Cracky painting when I first started you might throw up and I would be embarrassed cuz it looked like garbage but I didn’t know it at the tyme. It still is pretty jacked up in some ways but when you see it in real life it looks rather sick with all the shiny reflections and gold and such so I still know that it is basically awesome and I’m bummed if I can’t get a better pic of it…will look better varnished though and in a fatty gilded gold frame. I say again…boo-ya, and I hope to post the final version in a week or so unless I freak out and change something again.