Scott
Burdick
Oil Painting
Demonstration
Ok, here's my initial pencil drawing. On this painting I was especially concerned with tying together some of the lights and darks to make a nice pattern since the photo was way too broken up. I can't emphasize enough how important planning is before starting a painting. There are an infinite number of ways you can interpret any subject, so having an idea set clearly in your mind beforehand is crucial. Even when doing a simple portrait or landscape outdoors, I'll take a few minutes and think about what I want to go for in the subject. What is it about the subject that attracts me? Is it the color, the drama of the light? Do I want to paint it thickly, or thin? What sort of value range do I want to use? What's going to be the lightest light and darkest dark? How about the composition? If you can't answer basic questions like these then you are sure to run into trouble. Those first few colors and values you place will set the direction of the entire painting session, so make sure they're the ones you want! A good painting is done in your mind -- the actual act of putting brush to canvas is merely the conduit for those thoughts. If there is no thought to be conveyed, then painting becomes aimless and random (I know this for a fact, from first-hand experience!).
I also decided to do a small 8" by 10" color sketch to further work out my design and color scheme. When working so small it's easy to keep yourself focused on the larger shapes and patterns. You'll also find yourself a lot more willing to try different things since there isn't much time or paint invested in such a small sketch, whereas on the larger painting you might be very reluctant to experiment.
Don't let yourself do any details in the sketch. If the large shapes aren't interesting enough on their own, then you know you'll have a problem with the larger painting.
Here's the finished 8" by 10" color study. Notice especially how I've tried tying the light pattern together to make an interesting design moving all the way from the left of the canvas to the right side.
The larger painting will be 24" by 30". Here I've carefully sketched in the larger shapes with some charcoal to make certain that I get the composition exactly the way I want it. As you saw with the color sketch, I rarely do any drawing on a smaller painting, but on something larger it can be easy to get caught up in a small area and make it too large or small, which will throw off the rest of the painting's proportions when you get to them. I could block in the larger shapes at the beginning to keep this from happening, but on something like this I don't want to put paint down in areas that I won't get to for a couple of days since I'd end up struggling with the problem of working over dry paint.
As always, whether I'm working over a drawing or not, from a photo or from life, I start with the large shapes (of the area I'm considering at that time) first. Don't become so tied to your charcoal sketch that you're afraid to obliterate it with your block-in strokes -- you drew it once, you can draw it again as you paint! These large, underlying strokes give the work life and structure. Note also on the side of the face how I let the background and flesh color bleed into each other so that I can work the edges back and forth. Don't paint right up to the line or you'll simply get unnaturally hard edges.
When I'm doing demos or Quick Draws, I love the expressions on people's faces when they see the painting at this stage since it looks so utterly un-human that people must be wondering if I'm nuts. The thing is, once you start thinking purely abstractly, there's no difference from this stage and all the rest since I'm always concerned with the abstract shapes rather than wondering if I'm getting a likeness or not. If you get all the shapes right, then it will actually look like the person you're painting, which is the magical part of painting. But this won't happen until the very end, so don't let it creep into your thinking, and don't be bothered by all the raised eyebrows of those watching at the beginning. Only think, "Is this strange little shape in the correct place, value, color, edge, in relation to those other strange shapes that I've already put down?"
Now I slowly move to progressively smaller shapes. Notice also the layering of warmer flesh tones over cooler ones and vica versa. You can make the painting as colorful or as gray as you want. For this painting I'm going to use a more subtle breakdown of warm and cool. If I wanted to do it more colorfully, I'd merely think of which primary colors I mixed on my palette to make up the flesh tone "browns" and mix them on the canvas instead. The thing to keep in mind is that everything must be in the correct relation to each other. If I were to put in a pure spot of blue on this subject, I would have to balance it with pure yellows and reds as well.
If you're confused by this, think of something simple like purple. You can paint a color like this in countless ways and still be painting what you "see" without faking anything. First, you can mix red and blue and a bit of white together on your palette and put down a stroke of purple. Or you could put down the red on the canvas, then the blue next to it and let the eye visually mix the two. You could pull the red into the blue wet into wet to create the effect, or dry brush one over the other, or use crosshatching lines of the two colors, or use little dots... etc. Even in such a simple example there are unlimited ways the "reality" of that color can be expressed. This is basically what impressionistic color boils down to. It's taken for granted by artists nowadays, but when Monet and his group first introduced this simple concept it was revolutionary.
Now, when you're talking about something as complex and subtle as a face, the color possibilities are truly endless. Just remember, any gray is made up of primaries and you can paint it as colorful or as subtle as you like -- there is no formula, different artists will interpret the same subject in their own way even though they're all painting what they see. I remember when I was learning this in life drawing with pastels and was confused when I saw students using pure colors in their pictures. I knew I just didn't see pure green in a face -- was there something different about the way their eyes saw color, I wondered? I think it was Rose Frantzen or maybe Amy Berenz who took my pastels and showed me how you could mix the gray flesh tones I was using with pure colors by crosshatching.
Mr. Parks (my teacher) went even farther. I kept getting bigger and bigger sets of pastels, constantly complaining that I just couldn't find that exact flesh tone that I saw on the model. He finally locked my massive set in his locker, gave me a set of ten pastels he'd gotten from the drugstore with pure colors, black and white; and told me I was to use these for a couple months until I realized that I could mix any of the colors in my large set with them. It was a lesson I carry in my mind to this day. Here's a pastel demo I did for my last Scottsdale workshop class that better shows the concept of visually mixing brighter colors. From this larger viewpoint the colors visually blend together into their more grayish feel.
But up close -- you can see how I've broken them down to more primaries. Sorry for the fuzziness of the picture -- I just took a quick snap shot of it in the classroom, but I think you can see what I'm talking about here. Just remember, when you're breaking your colors down into warm and cool components, THE VALUES MUST BE THE SAME! Notice on the image below how the various colors in the shadow and the light pattern are exactly the same value.
Ok, back to the demo! In every area of the painting I do this, mixing a warmer and cooler color of the same value (even if it's just a subtly warmer or cooler variant of the color). I didn't even realize this until someone watching a demo pointed it out to me, but I actually mix the two piles of color on my palette right next to each other so I can visually gauge the value of the one against the other (thus unconsciously saving myself the time of having to test the value up on the painting itself). I'm trying to keep things vague as long as possible, letting the paint, colors, and edges mix on the canvas. At this point I felt pretty good about the direction things were going
Then things began getting away from me! I was getting too many hard edges, contrasty shapes and colors for what I wanted for this painting as a whole.
I kept trying to pull things together, but the more I fooled with it, the more it got away from me. Notice how busy things are getting. That's the problem when you don't get things right the first time -- you begin loosing those underlying large shapes and the whole falls apart.
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