Hullo reader!
My painting time has been consumed by the triplet goblins of Regular Work, Other Things To Do and Minecraft. I am ashamed.
However, I now publish my second study of Charles Darwin - unfortunately I'm having trouble getting the picture manager to work, so I'll have to describe these things a bit.
Rookie mistake here - I got carried away with drawing him and didn't measure it out properly - now he has an unnecessarily large beard. I always make this mistake out of sheer enthusiasm.
More after the jump!
In this picture I have started filling it in. The background is a dense, puplish mixture of Alizarin Crimson, Ultramarine, Burnt Umber and Payne's Grey, with a little Ivory Black thrown in after some frustration about getting the tone right. It's a strong mixture; this is only one layer of paint.
After the too-light and too-cold background I managed in the last study, I was trying really hard to do a rich, dark, warm, even wash for the background. Unfortunately I overslipped the lines I had set for the top of Darwin's scalp, and it looks like he has a deformed head. In my reference material, to be fair, it looks like Charles Darwin has a slightly irregular shaped head anyway, but this was not my intention.
So, the skin: I was trying out the Old masters technique of starting from greens and magenta for the flesh tones.
The first layer was a dilute wash Yellow Ochre with a touch of Coeruleum Blue, which provided a light base of green to work from. I tried to avoid the lit edges of the planes of his face with this.
The Second layer was a glaze of very dilute Alizarin Crimson, which makes a light magenta colour that you can see on the board on the left of the subject. It started getting awfully weird looking at this point, but I persevered. I added a touch of Ultramarine to the magenta glaze (just a tiny bit!) and repeated the washings in the darker, shadier crevices like under the brow and in the channels of the outer ear.
The third layer was a flesh tone that I had lying around on my palette from a previous painting, but would have been made up from Yellow Ochre, a little Cadmium Red, and a little Titanium White. I put it on moderately strongly, and blended the edges of the glazes out with a clean, damp brush. I used this as the midtone on the face, and covered most of it but the highlights, as well as using it to form the shade on the beard, especially around the mouth and the neck.
This is the last photo of the study, showing all that I have done so far. I have stopped here for several reasons, mostly to do with time constraint.
The last layers of shading are here applied. I used the magenta wash again but with more Ultramarine and some Payne's Grey to shade the darkest parts of the skin, like the wrinkles and folds of the brow and the sides of the shady parts of the nose, as well as a bit under the top lip and the nose.
For the dark parts of the hair I used a dark wash of Burnt Umber and Payne's Grey and dabbed it on in short lines to make a texture that vaguely looks like hair. This is something I'll be doing in the acrylic that is upcoming, so I thought I'd have a crack at seeing how it looks.
At this point I won't be doing any more on this study, as I think I have enough information on my mistakes to have a crack at the real thing. I might revisit the jacket in the future if I feel like it, though, and definitely would revisit it for a tidy up and do the jacket if anyone wanted to buy it.
What I've Learned From This Study:
1) Measure properly and keep a level head for the drawing !
2) The Old Masters may have been onto something. Funny, that..
My painting time has been consumed by the triplet goblins of Regular Work, Other Things To Do and Minecraft. I am ashamed.
However, I now publish my second study of Charles Darwin - unfortunately I'm having trouble getting the picture manager to work, so I'll have to describe these things a bit.
 |
| The Underdrawing - soft pencil on watercolour paper |
More after the jump!
 |
| In this picture you can really see the cockeye that Darwin's got going on. I don't know if this is a product of the loosening muscles of age, or whether he had that all his life, but I assure you that's what my reference material shows. |
After the too-light and too-cold background I managed in the last study, I was trying really hard to do a rich, dark, warm, even wash for the background. Unfortunately I overslipped the lines I had set for the top of Darwin's scalp, and it looks like he has a deformed head. In my reference material, to be fair, it looks like Charles Darwin has a slightly irregular shaped head anyway, but this was not my intention.
So, the skin: I was trying out the Old masters technique of starting from greens and magenta for the flesh tones.
The first layer was a dilute wash Yellow Ochre with a touch of Coeruleum Blue, which provided a light base of green to work from. I tried to avoid the lit edges of the planes of his face with this.
The Second layer was a glaze of very dilute Alizarin Crimson, which makes a light magenta colour that you can see on the board on the left of the subject. It started getting awfully weird looking at this point, but I persevered. I added a touch of Ultramarine to the magenta glaze (just a tiny bit!) and repeated the washings in the darker, shadier crevices like under the brow and in the channels of the outer ear.
The third layer was a flesh tone that I had lying around on my palette from a previous painting, but would have been made up from Yellow Ochre, a little Cadmium Red, and a little Titanium White. I put it on moderately strongly, and blended the edges of the glazes out with a clean, damp brush. I used this as the midtone on the face, and covered most of it but the highlights, as well as using it to form the shade on the beard, especially around the mouth and the neck.
This is the last photo of the study, showing all that I have done so far. I have stopped here for several reasons, mostly to do with time constraint.
The last layers of shading are here applied. I used the magenta wash again but with more Ultramarine and some Payne's Grey to shade the darkest parts of the skin, like the wrinkles and folds of the brow and the sides of the shady parts of the nose, as well as a bit under the top lip and the nose.
For the dark parts of the hair I used a dark wash of Burnt Umber and Payne's Grey and dabbed it on in short lines to make a texture that vaguely looks like hair. This is something I'll be doing in the acrylic that is upcoming, so I thought I'd have a crack at seeing how it looks.
At this point I won't be doing any more on this study, as I think I have enough information on my mistakes to have a crack at the real thing. I might revisit the jacket in the future if I feel like it, though, and definitely would revisit it for a tidy up and do the jacket if anyone wanted to buy it.
What I've Learned From This Study:
1) Measure properly and keep a level head for the drawing !
2) The Old Masters may have been onto something. Funny, that..
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