Robot Step-by-Step II

Hey again, everyone, welcome to part two! I decided that it would be crazy to put all the pictures I have of the process in one post, so splitting it up seemed like the smart move. If you came here before Step I, here's a link to that. It's probably best to do things in chronological order.

Step Four: Working into the layers:

Shading the Ground:

 Here I've added more Burnt Sienna to the landscape, especially in the foreground. It's undiluted, so the colour is stronger, and in the hills behind, I've worked in a mix of Burnt Sienna and Yellow Ochre wet-into-wet, and then added a little Titanium White to that mix and worked that wet-into-wet as well.





More after the jump

Robot Step-By-Step

Hey again, fellow travellers. This post is a step-by-step of the process I used to do my Robot with Lady painting.

 I'm posting this because I would like it - I like step-by-step articles on just about anything, because I always like to see processes as they happen, and I figure, write what you love. So here goes:


Step One: Transferring the sketch.
(Doing the sketch I'm treating like a whole other process)

 So this is the start of me transferring the original drawing to the painting surface. I drew the image directly onto tracing paper, turned it over and traced the lines with a soft pencil (e.g.4B). What you see is the result of putting the soft-pencil side of the tracing paper onto the painting surface, and running over the lines with a hard pencil (e.g. 2H) or a ballpoint pen (I used the pen).
     The surface I'm using here is a sheet of hardboard cut to about A4, and coated with a couple of layers of gesso, applied with a housebrush. I like the housebrush, because it gives a grain to the surface that you can really get some paint in (I'll later experiment with applying the gesso with just a flat edge, so that it goes on smooth).

More after the jump.

New Work

Ok, I'm a day behind, I got distracted. By pizza-related shenanigans. And forgot to take the picture. But it's here now. I get there in the end. This one is not a step by step post, I didn't take pictures of the process as I went along. Is that something I should do? If you have an opinion either way, please let me know in the comments. This is a bit of a beach at sunset, at a village called Collieston, which is near to the city in which I now live, Aberdeen. It's a rocky motherlover (geogeeks, UNITE!) and all the rocks are slanted at the familiar angle. I'm not sure what rock the beach is based on - given it's location in Scotland it's a fair bet to say either granite or gneiss. Next time I'm there, I'll take way better pictures of the rocks so I can furnish you, dear readers, with my best guess. More discussion after the jump

Aberdeen, the Silver City

I know it's been a while since my last posting, and I've been unable to maintain my commitment to discussing and presenting artwork on this blog; I'm sure that everyone can appreciate the hectic upheaval of suddenly moving cross-country. Now the dust has settled, and I'm getting back into a routine. At any rate, my move to Aberdeen, which might as well be referred to as the Windy City, has been exciting and informative. I've met some cool people - Nicole Porter of the Nicole Porter gallery, the friendly dudes at Rapport Tattoo and Tattooed Freak Body Piercing, which I think is related.

I've also met the Aberdeen Artists Society (at least one of them), which I'm looking to become a member of when I've got some stuff to bring along. I'm hoping that there I'll have some folk to talk to about art, and perhaps receive some instruction/motivation/inspiration. Speaking of which, I've also met Kenny, of my nearest art supplies shop, The Artist's Pad.  And another thing - the Aberseen Art Gallery. It's brilliant. It's far beyond my expectations. The McBey room, where the work of Scottish artist James McBey is displayed, is magical. It also houses Rembrandt etchings, but I was't looking at them. And it has a free-to-the-public art library! Needless to say, I've had a busy wee while.

Now that my oils have come up from Glasgow, I'm looking forward to getting stuck right in. With some brand new canvas and a few photos of the Aberdeenshire village Collieston to hand, I'm about to have a batter at it.
Photos of that hilarious effort to be published on this blog, tommorow.

Some actual talking about art

I have always intended to use this blog as a platform for artworks, and as a way or recording my progress as I strive to increase my art prowess. Thus I set myself a task - that I will write about art at least once a week and do a bit on a piece of my own also at least once a week.

This week, I'm going to do Landseer, because I picked an artist at random.

Just a brief look at his Wikipedia page will give you the bare bones of his biography and a couple of his more famous paintings. A little more Google-fu and you can see his less famous ones. I like these better. Olga's Gallery has a selection of more of them, my favourites of these being The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner, which just about brought tears to my eyes, such is the pathos of the subject, and Jocko With A Hedgehog, which cheered me up again. The man was a really good observer of animals, and they way they move and sit. Discussion below the link.

Oils, Inspirations and Visions

So I've recently been painting in oils. Water Miscible Oils, to be precise. They're made with safflower oil that has been chemically altered at the molecular level to be water-soluble. Paint and chemistry - together at last!

So it was important for  me to try and do some research on the subject, since I have no formal art training and I understand that oils are a highly technical medium. I want to do well right away. I read some online tutorials about the subject as preparation,  knowing, of course, that they wouldn't be quite enough. But at least I have a theoretical understanding of the very basics. I did some Googling around for these tutorials, scanned a few and discarded them, but there were two that stood out as being sufficiently nuts-and-bolts to help me - Jess Bates's website and Bill Martin's. There are, presumably, others that are technical in intention, but I'll have to get arounfdto them later.

It's also not enough to simply know how to do a thing - one also must know what to do with it. Sure I could be trying to do dry tonal exercises on spheres and cones, but to be honest that sucks boaby. I don't have the time or the canvases to spare on that, and little interest. I am aware that I'll probably have to do it to progress in the future, but right now I am focusing on having fun with the medium, mostly just figuring out for myself how the paint feels and works. The only problem is that to do anything other than dry technical exercises, it seems that one needs inspiration. And many days, I find that lacking.

Everyone has their own method of getting some inspiration together. When I feel like I need to do something, but don't have a clear idea of what I need to do, I generally round up my artbooks and leaf through them. I also do this with websites of artists whose books I don't own. So to present a very few of the colossal number artists whose work gives me ideas: dark-themed hyper-realist Michael Hussar, providing, if anything, a gruesome and insightful commentary through his symbolism (check out the piece entitles Vasoline), Scottish Colourist J D Fergusson who evidently delighted in the 'voluptuous delights of life', the expressive work of Chris Dingwell and the fantasy hyper-realism of Christophe Vacher, Paul Bonner and John Howe (I know, there's clearly something about me that loves highly detailed fantasy art). I might also suggest that one checks out the sculptorial/assemblage work of  Christopher Conte, which I discovered through the tattoo blog Needles and Sins. I love me some mechanisms and biomechanical stuff. Oddly not so much in tattoos, though.

Anyway, these are a few of the things that I am drawn to when languishing in the doldrums, or lost in need of direction. Like a dog that instinctively grubs for the roots and herbs that it somehow knows will cure it of its maladies, I return again and again to these people's work, most of all the sketches and preliminaries. There's more, of course, but that'll have to wait for another day.

So there you have it - a little technique, a little inspiration and a buttload of determination, and I'll go from here.

New Medium!

I've recieved a set of water-soluble oil paints as a gift, and accordingly

there's gonna be some changes around here


In practise that means that I'm going to be experimenting with the new textures for a while, and there may be some new, weird stuff in the gallery of www.hbartgallery.com.

As ever, work continues to mean that if I have anything other than painting to do of an evening, then unfortunately painting must go.  While I'm looking forward to having money, I've actually yet to be paid either, so it appears that I have fallen into the gap of the old axiom '' you can have time or money but not both'', as I have neither. 

First Project Part II

So this here is what my first landscape in acrylics looks like after the first round of painting. I was meaning to just put down thin layers of mid-toned colours to act as a basis on which to paint lighter or darker paint, but I got rather... carried away. 

What I got rather carried away with was doing the sky, and painted waaaay more detail of the tones than I meant to before remembering that I had meant to take pictures of at least every other step. So the land is very simple, and the sky is mostly done. I worked wet-into-wet for the most part, especially on the sky , but the long dry grass (the yellow on the left hand side) was a case of putting down a thin layer of Yellow Ochre, followed up by a drybrush with a hog-bristle brush of Burnt Umber. I found that I loved the combination of layers of golden yellow and the scumbled purple (Alizarin crimson + Ultramarine + Umber) clouds. I was really making a conscious effort to do the hills in increasingly washed light, pastel colours as they move towards the horizon, to make use of aerial perspective.

More details next installment.

First project

I should reiterate here that  my artistic training is virtually nil. I am self-taught in everything I do. I have read books, of course, but that's really no substitute. Thus, this is quite the learning experience for me.
So for my first project to kick things off, I decided it would be be st to get right out of my comfort zone. I don't want to be the kind of person who spends his life entirely in comfort. 

Here is the underdrawing for my first ever acrylic landscape painting. 

Mostly, what I do is watercolours, when on holiday, and plenty of graphite drawing around the house so acrylics are a big departure from the norm for me. I've had the set for a while now, and have never really managed to do anything worthwhile with them. Thus, I determined myself to do so. .

This is the charcoal underdrawing on a 12x14" gesso board from Windson and Newton

The story behind this painting goes like this;

My partner and I were walking along in some pretty fields near a canal in Lanarkshire one day, just taking the dog for a stroll. It was a warm sunny day, maybe about 19 degrees centigrade, and there was just a little bit of wind stirring some long end-of-summer grass. It was about two in the afternoon, when we abruptly felt the temperature drop and the light shifted. I was wrapped up in thoughts, not particularly noticing the surroundings, when my parnter took my elbow and she turned me around.

It looked like the clouds of frickin' Mordor were looming over the horizon hills, sunlight blasting out from behind them. It was golden, glorious sunshine, and the cloud was so ridiculously thick and dark. I wondered how anything that vast and menacing could possibly have sneaked up on us. Even the dog seemed to notice, and became apprehensive.

I took a picture with my trusty sidekick, and we beat a hasty retreat.

I have never seen the like of the rain that followed, and I live in the West of Scotland.