Evolution of a Painting
Hi everyone! Welcome to my blog. Here I’ll write about art, show pictures of works in progress and talk about creativity and inspiration in general. I hope you enjoy it, and please comment and tell me what you'd like to hear more about in coming weeks.
Shoreline on the easel, 2009
Ok, so I’ve gotten a lot of questions about my painting process. Like how do you start with an idea and then translate that into an actual painting? I thought it would be fun to show a step-by-step evolution of my 2009 painting, Shoreline, for my first post, so you guys can see how I go about creating a piece.
I usually begin with an idea that reflects a theme I’m thinking about. My theme for this piece was the quest to maintain faith/peace in difficult situations. Back in 2009 I was going through rough times, so maintaining faith during turmoil was something I was contemplating and praying about a lot.
After my theme is decided, I then pick the elements which will represent the theme to the best effect. With Shoreline, I decided on a portrait (representing humanity), a stormy ocean (representing tribulation) and a white swan wing (representing hope/grace). The red curtain is recurring in this body of work and helps to visually separate the foreground from the background while symbolizing a doorway into the mind's inner world (the landscape's tribulation). I generally use very detailed photographs to work from, or I stage elements in my studio and paint from life. (For example, to capture the shadow cast by the wing, I created a wing out of cardboard and suspended it from the ceiling on top of a curtain with the appropriate light source.)
Once the theme and subject is decided, I usually do a drawing and a paint sketch before I start the final painting. This is great practice, and it gets the composition (exact positioning of the wing, portrait, ocean landscape elements) worked out ahead of time so I can avoid unnecessary problems in the final.
Here is my paint sketch for Shoreline:
As you can see, the paint study is very different in color from the final piece. Once I had completed the study, it was clear that a blue-ish ocean did not emote the correct feeling of turmoil. It needed to be much darker and deep sap green in color with an active rain storm. The wing also fell flat with the cool blue/white color scheme of the stock photo I was working from: it needed to be warm and yellow ochre based. These changes make paint studies an integral part of the process because it’s much harder to change a color scheme in a large final painting than in a small sketch. My friend, Deepa, posed for the portrait, and my goal in the paint study with her was to hammer out her color tones and her exact placement with the other elements. I decided I liked her facing left with the wing tucked behind her so I kept this layout for the final.
Now to the fun part: creating the under painting which becomes the map for the final piece! Lord knows, this is my favorite part! Ahh, I so love it, but of course, every part of the process tends to be my favorite. LOL My under paintings are created in a warm brown color called burnt sienna, and I spend a lot of time on them because the quality of the blue print determines the quality of the final piece. The better the drawing, the better the final work! So it's at this point when the portrait becomes as accurate as possible (with overemphasis on shadows and highlights), along with the drawing of the other elements and their respective shadows.
Below are a number of photos to show my under painting and how I work through each element, filling in the color section-by-section. This is so fun! There is nothing more exciting than seeing your idea come to life!
The portrait beginnings. Here I have the figure nicely developed, but the background elements are still roughed in.
Complete under painting with defined wing, curtain and landscape.
The face begins to take shape.
The eyes were so much fun here, especially the shadow cast by Deepa's eyelashes onto her face. It's aspects like this that make faces so interesting to paint.
The hair is filled in, and the shadows deepened.
This is cool because it shows the painting slowly coming to life! Complete hair and face.
Deepa and the landscape completed.
The final piece! The deeper green color and added rain storm make the landscape much more powerful than the softer blue-green sea of the paint study. Also, the yellow-based wing is much more successful than the cool blue paint study wing. So overall, I was very glad I changed them for the final.
Once the painting reaches a 95% completion point, I stand back and really study it. Does it need to be pushed further or is it complete? I will notice things like a sky detail that needs to be defined more, or a shadow that needs more development. After sprucing those places, I will then stop and move on to other paintings but stare at it from time to time still wondering “is it complete”? When I get to the point where I feel satisfied with it (and we’re talking about bringing it to a “best I can do” level not a “good enough” level which was where I would initially stop as a new painter), I stop. The painting dries and I sign and varnish it.
And then I do it all over again! LOL Of course, years later I could pull out a painting and be like “Good Lord, that xyz is hideous!!” and be painting on it again fixing whatever it is that is standing out at the moment. But that’s all part of the artistic process.