He Knows, Doctor, He Knows

I'd had a couple of requests to paint a Star Trek scene and this is what I came up with.  It's based on a shot near the end of The City At The Edge Of Forever, the greatest ever Star Trek episode.  Left to right it's Spock, McCoy and Kirk.

The painting follows a standard formula.  It was drawn using the grid method and the characters were covered up with masking fluid while the background was painted.  I did depart from past practices in two places though.  Rather than spattering titanium white, I spattered the characters with masking fluid: the white spots on the characters are blank paper rather than white paint and I think this is a big improvement.  And I've used chunky salt crystals rather than table salt for some textural effects - again a big improvement.

The three primaries in the characters were transparent yellow and Prussian blue (because I wanted some greens in there to contrast against the red/orange backgrounds) and quinacridone magenta.  There's also some Payne's grey around the edges of the characters.  The background was built up gradually in layers, using raw sienna, burnt sienna, burnt umber, light red and Prussian blue.  The Prussian blue worked out really well and might have been a small touch of genius.  And there is some quinacridone magenta in the curtain on the right and some cadmium yellow in the curtain rings (as I needed an opaque yellow).

Good points about the painting are the background (where the layering worked out well) and Spock (especially his textures).  McCoy, though, refused to react to the salt crystals and Kirk is a bit too brightly coloured compared to the other two.  I do like, though, how I've captured The Shat in a frozen, wooden looking pose.  And I could claim that the abstract silhouettes capture the characters as they're being transported back to the Enterprise (or, more accurately, back to the original planet by the Guardian Of Forever).  Overall, it's just about acceptable.

Well, I thought it was at the time and put it i; t/e shop window but have since taken it down.

Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid

And here's today's second painting.  This one really is a Western.  For once it's an action scene rather than a pose.  I'm going to claim that I've done two action paintings today because Thursday night's BBC Celebrity Painting Challenge is going to be all about action paintings.  Believe me if you want to.

The three primaries in the figures are French ultramarine, light red and Indian yellow.  The choice of red and yellow were based on the orange feel of the background and my aim of limiting myself to one yellow and one red throughout the painting for consistency.  The background used those three primaries plus raw sienna (which I don't count as a yellow), burnt sienna, burnt umber and a bit (only a tiny bit) of quinacridone magenta in the barrel rings.  There's also some titanium white spattered on the end to look like a shower of bullets - this is from the scene where Butch and Sundance are faced with loads of gunmen and go down fighting.

After seeing what worked and didn't work in Invasion! I was feeling ambitious.  I thought I'd try using blue in the shadowiest places and yellow in the brightest.  I thought that, with this new approach, Payne's grey wouldn't be needed around the outlines of the figures.  And I thought I'd use some masking fluid on the guns so that I could paint them in afterwards in yellow.  This painting wasn't a handle turning exercise, applying old techniques to a new subject.  It was an experiment with new techniques.

And I can't believe how well it turned out.  The background (which I was half expecting to let the painting down) was OK, with its pillars, steps, barrels, windows and all.  But the figures!  They actually look like Hazel Soan figures!  I'm amazed.  This one is a big step towards becoming a better artist.  I was finding that the light red didn't mix brilliantly with the yellow and blue next to it, but that didn't cause any problems.  And there's the complimentary pairing of blue and orange against each other in so many places - not something I thought of beforehand but, in retrospect a touch of genius.

This one is up for sale.

Invasion!

I'm doing two paintings today.  Both are based on photos transcribed onto paper by dividing them into grids.  Both have the figures masked out, the background painted, the masking removed and, finally, the figures completed abstract-style.

And the first one isn't a Western for a change.  It's based on a photo of a bunch of mothers from South London doing tough mudder for charity.  They raised a fortune.  Good for them.  Rather than naming any of them in this unflattering painting, though, I'm calling this one Invasion!  Think of it as a load of alien zombies about to storm into your local Waitrose.

The three primaries today were French ultramarine, transparent yellow (for good greens) and quinacridone magenta.  All three are also used throughout the painting.  I also used some acrylic inks in the foreground and background (sepia, sap green and tiny bits of olive green and indigo ).  And there's some Payne's grey making up most of the outlines of the figures.

In places, I've used colours other than Payne's grey around the outside of figures in an attempt to distinguish them from each other.  And I tried to highlight in yellow the main figure's left arm - an attempt to improve on my usual formula of only thinking about the outlines of figures and not about depth, shadow or anything like that.

There's lots to like about this one.  The green sky is good, with the diagonal stripes adding a bit of energy and the inky background foliage adding a certain something.  The colours on the figure on the left are great.  And the yellow highlighting of the main figure's arm worked exactly how I wanted it to.  The larger of the two figures on the right is terrible though.  You'd think I could get the proportions right using a grid but obviously I can't.  You can see where I've added a head as an afterthought in an attempt to make what's there look vaguely humanoid.  I could always remove that figure with some tactical cropping but that wouldn't solve the biggest problem here, which is the middle ground.  The colour is made up of the three primaries, which is good, but I've made it much too dark and there isn’t enough contrast there against the figures.

This one has been cut up to use as collage material.

The Q1 2019 Poll

I thought it was about time I checked out public opinions on the pile of artwork that I had sitting around waiting to either be framed or put to one side for practising in the back of.  I put forward all 29 paintings from Derek's Dinner to Once Upon A Time In The West inclusive and respondents were asked to vote for up to ten of them.  The 29 paintings in scope included some absolute clunkers but I was finding it difficult to spot where to draw the line between paintings to include in and exclude from the survey - there was no big gap that I could see to separate the two groups.

Anyway, 22 people responded with votes and that's enough for me to understand the lie of the land.  This time round the survey came up with few surprises.  Winter Roots did disappointingly badly.  I'm guessing it doesn’t look as good on the small screen as it does in real life.  On the other hand, Grand Teton National Park came out higher than I expected - after two surveys, it's becoming clear that conventional landscapes are more popular with voters than I think they're going to be.  And the biggest shock to me was that every painting got at least one vote.  Even My Darling Clementine and Path To The Lake.  Whatever were people thinking?

Anyway, thanks to everyone that voted.  This is really useful to me in deciding what to do with these paintings later in the year.

Tombstone

After the roaring success of Once Upon A Time In The West, I thought I'd have a go at another Western.  This time it's Tombstone, the best of the four Westerns that I have in my collection that feature the gunfight a the OK Corral.  But after having dark silhouettes against a sunny background, I thought I'd try out the opposite idea and have bright silhouettes against a dark background.

The three primaries in the silhouettes are quinacridone magenta, Prussian blue and cadmium yellow.  It probably comes as a surprise to people that I'm using the opaque yellow here.  My problem was that, looking at my colour charts, Indian yellow doesn't make great greens and transparent yellow doesn't make great oranges.  Cadmium yellow can do both, so I went with the marginally lesser of two evils: one opaque yellow rather than two transparent ones.  All three primaries also feature in the foreground and the building, along with burnt umber, burnt sienna and raw sienna.  The sky is Payne's grey with spatters of titanium white, cadmium yellow and cadmium red.  So that's nine colours in total.  I also used some salt on the figures as they were drying.

I had so many problems doing this painting.  I fiddled, fiddled and fiddled with the building and foreground until I finally reached something acceptable.  And the figures were really badly behaved.  The paints were refusing to work together wet into wet but were quite happy to keep leaking into the sky.  At first I tried dabbing the sky clean with tissue paper, but that still left some residual primary colour leakage.  Then I tried spraying the whole painting and letting the figures leak into the sky.  I didn't like the resulting effect.  Finally, I went for dabbing the while painting dry (both sky and figures) and was amazed that it worked out so well.  The figures look even better dabbed dry and looking pale like ghosts.

I think this one definitely worked.  Best bits?  The pale values on the figures that add to their ghostliness, the complimentary contrast between orange heads and blue sky, the red outline along the right of the guy on the right and the loose painting of the building with random light bits showing through.  Worst bit?  Maybe the blue on Doc Holliday (on the left) is a bit too dark.  If anybody asks, I put this down to the alcohol in his system - if you've seen the film you'll understand.  Or maybe it's the sky showing through a a bullet hole?

It sold on the day it was put up for sale, along with two other Western paintings.

And, finally, as a special bonus, here’s the half way painting before the "colouring in".  I always think these look good.

Hotel California

After Free Bird and Comfortably Numb, I thought I'd have a go at another concert closer.

Believe it or not, I was wanting to make this a realistic abstract (after reading the Keest Van Aalst book) and to go for lots of simple, overlapping transparent layers, leaving them to dry between each layer (kind of in line with the Tom Hoffmann book).  I think it's safe to say I failed in both counts.  Too much planning for a Van Aalst, not enough planning for a Hoffmann.

Colours today were transparent yellow (in the greens), Indian yellow (in the lit up windows), Prussian blue, light red, raw sienna, burnt sienna and burnt umber.

I rate this one as a failure overall.  The sky's a bit too monotone and the greenery is overworked.  The building may be just about passable.  And those things that are palm trees on the album cover don't look like palm trees here.  Whatever it is they look like, they give the painting a druggy feel.  The best bit thing about the painting is the looseness.  The loose bits might look ugly but they're a step in the right direction.

The painting has been cut up to be used as collage material.

Realistic Abstracts, Kees Van Aalst - Book Review

This one is 160 pages long, but it’s one of those square shaped ones with smaller pages and a bit more white space so, content-wise, is probably comparable to an all too typical 128-page book.

I was hoping this would have more to say about abstract art techniques than that Rolina Van Vliet book sitting on my shelf, and I can confirm that it does.  Big time.  Whereas Rolina glossed over the "elements" of an abstract, Kees covers them in detail.  He talks about seven elements (line, tone, texture...) and seven principles (unity, contrast,...) and about how you can apply each principle to each element in a painting.  That's 49 things to think about if you take it all as gospel, but that's not realistic for me.  Instead, it gives me things to think about and way so to identify what's wrong with a picture that I might not otherwise be able to see (e.g. not enough unity of colour).  This is all illustrated with lots of examples.

There are also some short demos in the book.  I normally hate demos but these were useful.  You can see how these paintings start purely abstract with areas left white but then gradually morph towards something more realistic (say buildings or flowers) without ever getting there.

I can also confirm that this book is applicable to all sorts of painting.  It's not a book where there are huge chunks not applicable to watercolours (or to any other medium).

I'm dying to start putting some of this into practice.  This book gets a solid four palettes from me.  It’s telling that I'm writing this review just five minutes after reading the book, whereas I normally have to think for a few days afterwards before even rating books on Amazon.

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Mastering Composition, Ian Roberts - Book Review

144 pages plus DVD.  I thought I'd check out a book on composition and this book by Ian Roberts has been getting rave reviews for some time.  So I thought I'd start here.  There are four main sections  in the book.  Let's take them one at the time.

The first big section was on what he called armatures.  I found it fascinating.  He talked about certain ways to design a painting and illustrated it with examples.  There were some truly amazing mathematically constructed old masters in there.  This is what I wanted to read about in a book on composition.

The next section was on value masses and on treating them in an abstract way.  Again, this was what I wanted to read about, although it's something that's also been covered in other books (like Tom Hoffman's classic).

The third big section was on colour and this was where I started to become disengaged.  There was interesting stuff in there about how colour's not just about hue and value but also about intensity (intensity being the thing you dull down by mixing in some earth colours).  Kind of interesting but I'll be buying a book on colour theory sometime, at which point this section will become redundant for me.  This is also the stage at which a book that started looking relevant to all mediums became more oils focussed.  There's a bit where he said that paintbrushes are dumb and that you can't leave them to do all the work.  I've heard Hazel Soan say exactly the opposite on YouTube (and I need to get her Essence Of Watercolour book at some point to learn more).

And the fourth section was on guiding the eye through the painting.  It's one of those things that many writers talk about but nobody takes the time to explain.  And the bad news is that, despite Ian devoting a whole chapter to the subject, I didn't find that he explained it well.  There are lots of examples but this feels like one of those areas where the principles need to be set out at the beginning and then illustrated with examples.  The DVD acts as a supplement to this section, with lots of examples of paintings being slightly tweaked in a way that makes them worse by guiding the eye to the wrong place.  And this was another section that was too focussed on oil painting for my liking.

Overall, I found the book useful.  The first section was excellent but subsequent sections less so, either because they were less relevant to watercolour or not well enough explained. And looking back at this book a couple of years later, it seems a little dull.  I give this one three palettes.

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