serendipity

something amazing happened the other day. i had run out of paintings to work on and picked up a wood panel i had prepared some weeks ago. i had coated it with white acrylic paint and then put it on a shelf. i found it under a pile of carbon-copy paper, and some of the carbon ink had rubbed off on the panel. first i tried to remove it with some of the thinner i use when i paint. didn’t work. so i tried acetone. well it melted some of the tape i had covered the edges, but didn’t remove the smudges fast enough for me, so i poured the acetone over the panel, and then soaked up the acetone with tissue. that worked, it better than worked. it etched patterns into the paint on the panel, clearing some parts of the panel of carbon smudges, diluting some other parts…and left an amazing ‘image’ – which i decided to ‘enhance’.

Ereshgikal

now it’s not finished, but it will be.

doing a turner 2

remember this post? well i finally dared to give it a try – i transferred the photo to a large canvas, traced the important parts and… then under painted in white, pale yellow, bright red and a grey i got by mixing alizian crimson, ultramarine blue, viridian green and titanium white:

i did a lot of blotting with a rag, to get rid of the brush strokes.

i let it dry out and then i added some more bright red and yellow and painted in the foreground in payne’s gray. again i did a lot of blotting with a rag. i really liked the almost three dimensional effect i got from the foreground against the background. it reminds me a lot of some background/foreground work done by Disney Studios.

a spanish lady

as i have said i have several paintings ‘in action’ at a time, to avoid creative boredom, and here is another one of those:

The Spanish Lady.

i started out with a collage made by my wife, transferred the ‘subject’ to a fairly large canvas. then i under painted the back-ground, the flower, and her dress in white, added the yellow and the ‘shadow-lines’ in the flower in red. here i am aiming at a more detailed, ‘photographic’ result in some of the details in the painting, and a less detailed, more expressionist, broad result in other parts of the painting. let’s see where it takes me.

work in progress 3

i have been busy, though i have let some paintings ‘rest’ – sort of fearing where they would go if i continued on them…

one of those resting pictures was this – Shabbat – which you might remember from this post. well, despite the Olympics, i had a violent need to paint on august 4 – and ended up picking up that painting and work on it:

i had run out of black and it takes a few days for the mail to deliver my order for 3 tubes of paynes grey and 3 tubes of ivory black. but looking around the net at various art sites i learned that by mixing alizian crimson, ultramarine and viridian green i could get black, so painting in the candleholder (which is made of iron) was not a problem. as you can see i have worked pretty hard. half-way through this i decided that instead of trying to paint the photo, i’d go with simply painting the SUBJECT, letting the brush strokes show and add texture. now this is not finished either, but i am confident that it will be eventually.

work in progress 2

i feared this subject, in fact i still do, because so many things can go wrong.

in a moment of weakness i decided to paint a portrait of my wife. i shiver at my audacity.

luckily i had a good photo to paint from – but no photo, however good can cover the lack of skill in the artist.

i decided that i wanted to go partly fantasy, since i am only using the photo for transfer to canvas anyway.

i manipulated this photo some years ago (blurred the background and touched up the skin).

tracing the basic components of this face turned out to be rather hard, since light is coming from two directions. but i did and then covered the ‘foreground’ in ‘painters’ tape, laid the background, blending and blotting the colors using tissue paper. once it had dried i removed the tape and under painted the entire area in white, making sure to let the drawn in details shine through, then i added color on some areas to make a basic shadow/high-light ‘template’.

i left the eyes, eyebrows and mouth blank, wanting to work in tight detail on those.

then a lot of stuff happened – i painted when i felt an urge, but honestly do not remember what i did to reach this (well, i do remember some:

such as what i did yesterday – glazing the background (little pigment, lots of painter medium) making sure to keep the areas ‘clean’, thus adding depth and clarity. then i did the same with the hair (which i had initially under painted in cadmium yellow, medium shade, and accented in orange and burnt sienna) and the head-wear. i am more pleased with this painting so far (it’s not done, still need to work on the face…) than i thought i would be. i might not be GOOD at this, but i am not bad.

doing a turner

a friend of mine was gracious enough to allow me to use one of his photographs as a stock photo for an oil painting.

the image is breathtaking, and i knew right away when i saw it that i wanted to try transferring it to canvas.

it will demand that i ‘do a turner ’ – i.e work with a white/yellow/light grey under painting and then add details in layer upon layer using glazes (lots of medium mixed with not so much paint). here is the original photo:

i have no idea if i will succeed, but i do hope so.

i like the idea of “using watercolor technique with oil paints” as it gives me more leeway in terms of correcting mistakes as i go.