Rocket's Red Glare

Ghost Factory Cover Art

Here are some process shots from the painting I did for the cover of Ghost Factory magazine.

I was working on a piece of relatively toothy illustration board with Golden acrylics, (Titanium White, and Mars Black) and FW acrylic ink, for the line-work, and to mix into my blacks instead of water.

Initially, I laid down a wash of diluted ink, to give myself a mid-tone to work off of, and so that I could lay down the basic shapes in white, rather than a darker tone.

With the basic shapes estalished in truly rough drags of white acrylic, I go in for some definition with indiluted FW ink and a 6 round watercolor brush. Mainly, I am establishing the form of the ships that will be the focal point of the illustration, but I also take the opportunity to play around with a texture on the ocean. I can always paint it over (which is exactly what I end up doing.)
With the forms of the ships established, I fill in the ships once more with white acrylic, to take take down the severity of the ink line, then lay in the shadow shapes in a slightly darker than midtone grey. I always like to work near the middle of my value range at first, so that I can save the blackest blacks (and lightest lights) for where they might be needed. (In my experience, it is easier to make a piece darker than lighter.

I paint the background second, starting with the light circle, and cleaning painting the dark margin last. As each plane of paint masks the one under it, I take the opportunity to clean up the contours, and sometimes correct the outline of shapes.

Finally, after a little back and forth with the values of the major shapes, I lay in the details.

Finally, I desaturate the colors in photoshop, and superimpose a " #3 " that I have painted separately.

For more of the preliminary work, check out my Illustration Work blog.

Cabuya Water Color

I just returned from my honeymoon in Cabuya Costa Rica.

We were there for a month and, as I had limited luggage space, I took the opportunity to do some work on paper. ( Something I have put on the back burner for the past six months or so with my return to oil painting.)

This piece is 11" x 14" on Fabriano 113 pound paper. Pretty lightweight stuff that comes hundred sheets to the block. Great for sketching but a little thin for really washy work.

After doing some really gestural sketching in a diluted yellow line, I finalized my line work with a more saturated mixture of earth tones. ( I tend to do all my design and drawing work with a brush rather than a pencil. The water color moves more fluidly than graphite and I am less likely with a brush to get lost in minutia. And, when it comes time to apply color, I need only to repeat the brush moves I used in the underpainting.)

Quickly, a note on the drawing itself:
In making this composition I began with the central image of the two men unloading the back of a truck. I hadn't intended it to be anything more than a monochromatic study of this little scene, so I worked out all the line work here before even moving on the the other elements in the composition. This approach is not recommended as it often leads to inconsistencies in perspective. To incorporate the rest of the elements, I first read the placement of my figures to determine the pitch of the plane below their feet. As long as all the other elements seemed to be lying on the same plane, more or less, the sense of space in the piece would be consistent. Outside of that, composition decisions were mainly a matter of filling the space without distracting from what I felt was my subject, my two guys.

After the drawing stage I knew I wanted to get to a point where the line work would not be neccessary in order to read the image. I work from drawings alot, and this is my primary criteria for determining whether a painting is finished. My first step was to lay down a consistent underwash of color for the two largest areas in my compostion, the ground and the foliage. This serves two purposes: It quickly distinguished my figure ground relationship ( all the unpainted elements stood out against the darker background), and in later stages when I wanted to create some variety in the tone and hue of the foliage or ground, I would have the connective tissue of underpainting to knit these areas together.

In the last stage the smaller areas of color are addressed. As a rule of thumb I tend to work from largest to smallest shapes, and do all areas with the same color at once. So in this case, I first addressed the foliage, bringing greater definition to both the large areas and the smaller patches gradually and leaving anything resembling detail or outlining for a later, then moved to the blues of the sky, truck and house, and finally, with everything else more or less finished, addressed the figures, leaving them light enough in value to stand out against the background.

After a few levels of washes all of my colors were where I wanted them to be. At this point I used a folded napkin and a clean, water loaded brush to do a little erasure. I had erred on the side of over saturation in my color, which gave me the ability to clean up areas where I wanted to make highlights, or set one element off from the element beside it.

Arial View of My Kitchen

This is a new painting I have been working on. It is the first piece I have done in oil paint at this scale ( roughly 30" x 40") since I began reintroducing myself to the medium at the end of last year. Over the course of the last few months I have been doing alot of work to grow more comfortable with the medium, and I am just beginning to feel the same freedom with it that I have felt in the past with gouache.

The composition of the painting came out of a challenge I gave myself to draw my kitchen without using perspective. The subject matter ( my kitchen ) has been cleaned up a little, but for the most part I have tried to use only the things in my kitchen as they actually exist. This distinguishes it from my interiors from 2007, all of which were composites or completely fabricated for the sake of the paintings.

I have included a few images of the real article below to give you a sense of the liberties I have taken with the subject matter.

Surfer Portrait

This series of photos gives a pretty good insight into the process that goes into almost all of my paintings, figurative or otherwise. If anything sets it apart from my usual output, it is the fact that since I intended this as a sort of demonstration, I have followed my own rules more closely than I probably would have otherwise. Most of the information about my working habits can be gleaned from the pictures above without too much exposition on my part (click on the picture for a closer view) , but I will give you a little tour of the painting experience and see if there is anything I can add.

The first marks I make on the canvas are guidelines more than anything. I am giving myself a little preview of the composition and making any changes I might want to make to the placement of the biggest shapes. In some cases I will have made a preparatory drawing in which decisions about smaller shapes and more nuanced shading will have been worked out. This is not the place for that information. These marks will be totally obscured by later work. I will save my more delicate observations about form for later.

Once these lines are in place I knock in my most general colors. What I am creating is a moldable platform on which to lay more detailed information. I am not even reaching for the illusion of a face at this point. I am reaching for the illusion of a roughly head shaped lump. I am filling the area I will be working on with paint so that in later stages I have something build off of. I have two colors mixed at this point, a stand in color for all the areas that will be in light, and a stand in color for all the areas that will be in shadow. I try not to worry about anything besides this distinction at this point. Also, I am not thinking about the edges I am creating between my light and dark shapes. If I go out of my way to smooth this edge, or make it consistent in any other way, I am giving myself an artificial and unconsidered limitation later on.

With my rough platform in place I am ready to start bringing more attention to the smaller forms of the face. My palette becomes more complex, including skin tones both lighter and darker than any in the base coat I have laid down, as well as a ruddy hue that I will add to my colors occasionally to approximate the variety in skin tone in different areas of the face. I may work certain areas farther towards completion than others at this point, but in general I am working each form into the one beside it, so no two areas can really be tackled as completely separate forms. Smaller details, especially the planes that make up the eyes and mouth, must be worked up to gradually. I must wait until I have succeeded in observing and depicting larger forms, after which the mouth and eyes can be suggested with a few final strokes. If more than this is needed to convey these features, I know I have not done my preliminary work well.

Up to this point I haven't tackled anything outside of the figure. If I were doing a more complicated painting, I probably wouldn't take the painting this far without establishing the color and basic form of the other elements. In any case, once I have turned my attention to the shirt, hair, and background, I tackle them in much the same way: First a rough drawing, then a base layer of unmodulated color , and finally the application of darker and lighter color in the creation increasingly smaller and more nuanced planes.

The mundane chaos of my kitchen examined

As with the painting discussed in the following post, both of these paintings are drawn from high traffic areas in my appartment. In the course of a day these still lives are in a constant state of being organized and dissolved. At any given point during the day their orientation is a physical reminder of my recent history.

Making compositional adjustments in real time

As with many of the paintings I have been working on recently, I am painting from a small drawing that I did in my sketchbook. The first step is to copy the drawing onto my canvas using a round brush and oil paint diluted with turpentine to the texture of ink. In the initial drawing stage I use the oil paint as a transparent wash, like watercolor. Unlike watercolor or ink wash, the oil paint can be almost entirely erased at this stage with a turpentine loaded brush and the edge of a folded napkin. Because of this I don't worry about too much of a system in transferring the image. I work from object to object, or, if the composition is made up of very small shapes, I will lay down guidelines. When the linework has finished, and before I have filled any of the shapes I will make adjustments, erasing and reapplying lines and allowing the surface to become a little cloudy with the ghosts of previous marks, when the composition is ready I will let this first layer dry. Very subtle shading can be done at this point, and can serve as a guide for the more opaque modeling that will be done in later stages.

In this picture you are seeing the first marks of paint in the second stage. Generally, in this stage I would just be reinforcing the decisions I had already made, first choosing a color to fill all my shadows with ( more subtle variation in shadows will happen later) and then oulining and filling the shadow shapes I had already established in the drawing stage. In this case, however, I have used this stage to correct prroblems in the oringinal drawing. ( The objects as I had intitially drawn them seemed too large compared to the counter surface.) Since I used a relatively light color for my initial drawing lines, I can replace them easily without being confused about which is the final line. When I am filling my shadow shapes I generally begin with the smallest ones so that I can get these more complicated areas out of the way. Regardless of its size each line in the outline of a shape must be tackled seperatey, so smaller, more intricate shapes provide a greater challenge than the larger background shapes which are often defined by longer straight lines. In this painting the most complicated shapes where those of the elipses on the top of the pot and cup. By doing these first I am able to do alot of erasing without messing up any wet line work.

The second picture is what the painting looks like at the end of the second stage. All the shadow work has been done and the highlit areas have been filled painted in with white. This is the first point in the painting when you really see the relationship between light and dark shapes that will inform each of the adjustments that follow. In some cases, what drew me to the subject initially has dissapeared at this point, in which case I do some adjustments to bring the out the subect matter. Generally though, I am drawing with this stage in mind. The adjustments I make to the subject as it is observed initially ( mentally rearranging objects, changing the relative size of objects, adding objects that did not exist ) are made in order to create a more dynamic relationship between dark and light shapes,

In the following post I will give you two examples of paintings which have followed this same process.