Saturday, July 31, 2010

Borrego Palm Canyon Demonstration

PALM TREES • DESERT • SPRING • LANDSCAPE ART • DEMO • MISSOURI LANDSCAPE ARTIST




This will be my first step-by-step posting. A 20" x 20" studio painting on canvas based on my own photographs. The scene is Borrego Palm Canyon, a beautiful oasis in southern California that I hiked back to last March. After working out a square composition at 8" x 8" I scale it up to the big canvas by drawing a grid. I do this because it's hard to see a large canvas all at once and very easy to get proportions out of whack. I start on white gessoed linen and do the under drawing with a thinned down brown tone using a large brush. I don't want to get too caught up in detail because I'm going to cover everything up with thicker paint.

Now it's time to squeeze out some serious paint. I begin blocking everything in the scene that I perceive as in shadow. If you think of white as 0% and black as 100%, I'm painting everything that's darker than 50% gray. I'm going pretty quickly here, thinking more about big shapes and not details. Everything lighter than 50% I leave as canvas white for now.

The next step is to paint all the lighter areas of the painting in the same manner. My goal in this session is to get the entire canvas covered with paint. No details yet, just major shapes. I know, the triple palm looks silly without any trunks but I would rather paint the distant hills as one mass and then paint the thin trunks than try to paint inside the little negative spaces between them and try to make it match. This is the part of the painting I'd rather not have someone looking over my shoulder. After finishing this block in, I can already see values and hues that I'm going to have to adjust. To put it bluntly, there are some things here that bug me. But that's what I like about oils. I can add more paint.

What was bugging me the most was the big white rock pile in the middle. It was stealing the show so I knocked it back with some warm and cool grays. I've also added those palm trunks as well as details in the background, the rocks on the upper left and the water.

In this session I finished the water feature and tuck lush foliage all around it to emphasize it's life giving power. The goal here is to contrast the water and foliage with the surrounding desert.

At this point I started to sense a composition problem. My eye wanted to flow from the upper left to the lower right and out of the picture. To fix this I added some palm foliage above the big rock on the right to hold everything in. Finally I go all around the entire canvas, taking each area to the level of finished detail that I feel it needs. I then sign the lower right and call it done.


Sunday, July 11, 2010

Early Art 2: The Sequel


Beneath the Planet of the Apes, 8 1/2 x 11, Bic pen on hotel stationery, 1970

The other piece of childhood art. This one was saved by a schoolmate, passed on to a cousin and finally came into my possession two years ago. I did the drawing when I was ten after seeing the film at the old palatial Fox Theatre. It was one of the few places in small town Missouri where a kid could get a real sense of awe. The thick asian rugs, the tapestries, the statues and finally that immense ornate ceiling. It made every matinee movie seem important. The drawing was most likely done at our dining room table with a stack of "Famous Monsters of Filmland" magazines for reference. With crosshatching and very light pressure, I found I could get a full grayscale of values.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Early Art: From Aunt Esther's Kitchen Table

Anachronism, 8 1/2 x 11, Bic pen on typewriter paper,1969

I only have two drawings from my childhood. This one was saved by my Aunt Esther. It was done when I was nine years old on a stormy summer weekend when we were forced to entertain ourselves indoors. My influences at the time were a stack of old Mad magazines and the film "The Planet of the Apes." As if combining Taylor, the Statue of Liberty and a few Tyrannosaurus weren't enough, I've also turned the torch into an ice cream cone.