Scott
Burdick
Oil Painting
Demonstration
This is the original 12" by 9" painting that I wanted
to do as a larger, 30" by 24" studio painting.
The model for this is Ruth Gray, a local girl who my wife and I met as a waitress in a
restaurant here in North Carolina.
It's sometimes nice to do a smaller painting like this first because it allows
you to work out any problems beforehand. It's always easier to experiment and
try different things in a sketch. I also find it easier judging the painting
as a whole since one tends getting caught up in small sections when working on a larger canvas. Every time I felt this
happening during this painting I was saved by this sketch and reminded how each
area related to the whole and how simply and directly I should be treating the various areas.
The process that I followed in the following demo is also essentially the same
process I used in doing this smaller version, just with larger brushes!
Here's my preliminary drawing in pencil on a white, 30" by 24" canvas panel. If you're having trouble with your basic proportions or drawing accuracy in general, then it is probably best for you to spend some time doing straight charcoals in a life drawing class (I took four years of life drawing with my teacher, Bill Parks, at the American Academy of Art in Chicago). I personally use the head-measuring method for getting my proportions, though I will skip that when doing quick-sketches or smaller paintings. I can't emphasize this point enough, since drawing is the key to everything. Even beyond this general proportional outline, you'll be using your drawing skills with each brush stroke you place, so having absolute mastery over this very mechanical skill is what allows you to express the creative stuff.
Whether or not to draw something out on the canvas or to go right into painting is a much debated point. I work both ways myself. For a simple portrait or landscape I will go directly into painting, which makes it much easier to get nice edges and brushwork. For something more complicated like this, where the exactness of the composition is essential, I draw it out beforehand. The drawback to this is that you will find yourself struggling with the impulse to paint within and up to the lines, making your edges and brushwork suffer. The advantage, of course, is not worrying if that hand or foot is going to drift off the edge of the canvas! For each painting you'll have to gauge which advantage is more important. You might notice that I've written "Lost Edges!" in the upper left of the canvas as a reminder to myself. Sometimes I'll write "Squint and compare" or some other thing that I feel I need to work on.
Here I'm starting with the center of interest, the face. I'm also throwing some of the background in so that I have some paint along the edge of the cheek and forehead to work the edge.
Slowly and patiently, I work from area to area, first blocking in the lager patterns and then placing the smaller and smaller patterns over the top of these. If you can get it right the first time you place the details, then you'll still be able to see the underlying, bold strokes and this is what will make your painting look loose and alive. That's why drawing skills are so important. The more you have to adjust your brushwork, the more smooshed together things will become (at least for my taste). Try and plan out your brushstrokes like Scrooge himself; the fewer you can do it in, the more powerful your painting will look. If you're confused by this, think of painting a nose. You will want to paint the shadow underneath the nose in a large, simple brushstroke; then use a couple others to paint in the dark of the nostril. If, on the other hand, you paint the smaller shape of the nostril first, you'll have to use lots of little fussy brush strokes to fill in the shadow area around the dark. Once again, always do the larger shape first in as few strokes as possible, then the smaller ones!
Here's a couple of close-ups of the face. Since the light source of this painting is a north window, the lights are relatively cool and the shadows warm. If I were working with a spotlight, these temperatures would be reversed. One thing to keep in mind about this is that the temperature of the light is mixed with the local color of the object itself. Therefore, the light side of the face is only cool in relation to the shadow of the face, even though both colors might be technically warm in the color spectrum. This is also true of the blue shirt and red skirt -- I'm using blue for both the shadow and light of the shirt, but I'm using a cooler blue for the light side and a warmer blue for the shadow side. It's only when an object is white that you will see a true opposite of color in the light and shadow since, in the case of white, it has no local color to affect the color of the light hitting it.
Here's some details of brushstrokes in the background. Though I'm considered a realist, I like to make every section of the painting interesting from an abstract texture or design point-of-view. I sometimes block off small sections of my painting and ask myself if I framed just this part would it still be interesting even though you can't tell what it is. If it can't, then I have some more work to do. Just painting something accurately enough for someone to recognize what it is isn't enough for me.
Here's a close-up of the reflection in the mirror as I used a combination of brush and palette knife work to block in the light areas.
I decided to keep the dark values of the mirror reflection two or three values lighter to both create distance and make it look more like a reflection, even though it was just as full value in the actual scene.
Just plodding along slowly and steadily, covering up that white canvas! Mr. Park's used to shout out "Don't go any faster than you can with accuracy!" about ten times a day and I still hear his voice echoing in my head each time I sit down in front of that easel.
Here's another detail. I'm trying to create a variety of edges
-- some razor sharp, some lost completely, and all the varieties in between.
There are countless ways to make a soft edge. You can smudge it, scrape it with
a palette knife, dry brush, or mix up intermediate values and lay them in between
a dark and light edge.
Try and forget what you're painting. Think of things as abstract patterns of
interrelated shapes. This is what is meant by "seeing like an artist".
Our mind's preconceived notions of what a face looks like, of what color a tree
or sky is are what keeps us from painting what we all really see. I remember
reading that autistic children cannot be fooled by visual illusions because the
part of their brains that puts things in context to what is around it and what
its seen in the past doesn't function "normally". I personally think
that this is one of the reasons many autistic individuals are artistic prodigies
since this very process of de-contextuallizing the world is what makes doing a
great painting possible and is one of the hardest things to train our
"normal" minds to do. This is precisely why foreshortening is so
difficult for the beginner. No matter how often one measures, it's a monumental
struggle to convince the mind that the foot in the foreground is twice the size
of the head in the distance! I remember in life drawing measuring such things
out, placing my marks, and then, when I started drawing the foreshortened area, unconsciously
making it smaller and smaller. It wasn't until Mr. Parks came around and pointed
out my initial marks that I even realized I'd been deviating from them! Once you
get to the point of treating everything as an abstract shape without all the
other baggage, you'll be able to paint anything with equal ease.
Here I've taken a large brush and washed in the skirt with some Alizarine Crimson, a bit of blue, and some mineral spirits to thin it down a touch. As I put in folds and highlights, I'll try and leave as much of this initial block-in show through as possible.
Below is the block-in of the chair back. I've tried to leave the edges halfway between hard and soft, giving me latitude to lose some and then sharpen others as needed.
And here's the final painting below. Since it's 30" by 24" it's a little harder to get a sense of it when it's blown down to such a small size, but at least this will give you an idea of the process.
Here's a shot of my easel with the small sketch on the left and the larger version in progress.
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