Five Grayscale Digital Paintings
I started the new term and I’m taking the continuation of digital illustration. The first project was actually to do five different digital paintings in grayscale. I like working in grayscale, but I was a little concerned at the number we had to do. We had to take them pretty far in the first week, and finish them in the second (while also starting another assignment in week 2). I was kind of worried that I would struggle because I’ve had trouble figuring out how to shade smoothly in Photoshop, but I finally had a bit of breakthrough and figured it out. I’m including the reference photos with each of the final versions of the pieces. Portrait I sketched each of these out in blue first, but I didn’t save many of the intermediate versions. But here’s an example for the portrait, with the first sketch I did on the…
Landscape Studies in Ink and Acrylic
Although I ended up having to drop it because of time constraints, I took Landscape Painting for a few weeks. I was excited to learn this better, because I want to eventually do paintings based on the photos I took during all the traveling I did in my 20s. All I got to was studies, but they’ve been kind of fun because I’ve been working in ink (just using a single 0.5 Topic Multiliner SP pen). Most weeks, we have field studies to do, and we’ve had to do several in ink and then one 8 x 10 inch value study in grayscale acrylic paint. We’ve also had to do some “master studies,” where we recreate famous paintings in ink or grayscale paint. Here are a handful of my ink field studies (these are from the first week): These are all views around the downtown Renton library. Here are a…
A Master Copy
I had an assignment in my life painting class (which is still killing me) to copy a Master painting from the 17th century. I picked a Rubens: (Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of Isabella of Bourbon, c. 1630) I thought there was a good range of values and colors, although I knew the collar would be tough. Her face is weirdly pale, though it was probably accurate. The first step was to do the drawing and then outline it in black paint. The second step was to tint the background (first layer only), and I had started that when I remembered to take a picture: I did this on 18 x 24 inch Gessobord, although I taped off the bottom 3 inches because there was enough of her dress/coat/whatever showing. I had to sort of make up what was going on to the right because I shifted her over to the…
A Multi-Step Painting
I just finished a three week life painting project, done in acrylics. I actually showed one of the early stages in my last post, but I’m going to walk through the steps for this one. We had to choose a pose and first do a version heightened with white over a black outline. Here is that part (sorry for the yellow light): I had some trouble laying down the background, which was done after I did the outline in black paint, so it looks a little wonky to the left of where her eyes are. I also only rendered part of the fabric she was lying on (totally out of laziness—also, painting fabric is hard). This ended up being kind of funny. The next step was to do a full grisaille painting, basically just using black and white, but with glazes (so basically black glazes layered on). It isn’t as…
More Grayscale Painting Techniques
I’m taking a life painting class this term, and they’re still trying to teach us how to paint in general, so we’re going back to the basics with classic techniques. We’re supposed to be using oils for this class, but I talked to the instructor and got permission to use acrylics throughout. I seriously hate oils and will never use them voluntarily. But also it makes more sense to me to continue developing in one medium, especially one I’m more likely to use some day. The first assignment we had was just to paint a plaster cast. I found one of a “young British woman” on Amazon and did that one. We had to paint a wash of ivory black for the background. Here’s the final result I came up with for that one: I think it’s decent, but the instructor pointed out that my brush strokes could be smoother,…