Oil Painting on Cotton Canvas, December 2023
Reference and Inspiration:
A Patient, Bearded Father and His Hairy, Needy Child
A Balance of Opposing Figures Following the “Rule of Thirds” with Strong Lighting
This was the one of many Christmas gifts I made for my family in 2023, and it features my cousin’s husband, Russ, and their cat, Glenn. Glenn’s interesting. He has been described as needy, as well as sedentary. I believe he can stand on his hindlegs and hold that pose for a bit. A character is Glenn.
After looking through a few photos I could paint of these two, I landed on this one. I cropped it slightly and tilted it to get the composition the way I wanted, but mostly this image had guided the eyes pretty well around the canvas as it is. Both figures are hovering around one-third into the canvas, which is a good rule of thumb for design and ideal place for focal points.
The lighting is also direct: one side light, one side dark. It’s clear for the viewer. I liked the color palette of greens and blues, as well as the contrast between Russ’s skin tones and Glenn’s hairy snout and fluffy body.
Thumbnail Sketches, Wash Over the Canvas, and Underpainting:
Guiding Armatures. An Interesting Design. Clear Distinction of Light and Shadow.
Using Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna to Draw the Right Lines and Values
I sketched this painting idea at a very small scale. It’s easier to work out big problems at this size. I didn’t use all the thumbnails in the same way.
The 2 on the left were used to identify the values: darkest darks, lightest lights, and mid/half tones. Where are the sharp edges? Soft edges? Gradations? I was satisfied with how the dark and light shapes were reading by the second thumbnail, but if I wasn’t confident in them, I would have done more sketches.
The 2 to the right, I used to figure out the most important lines and edges of the image. This helps to simplify my understanding of the outline or design of the piece. But, at a higher level, some of these lines and shapes that guide the viewer's eye can be armatures, or lines that move a person’s gaze through the painting. I don’t have much experience designing a piece around armatures, but, luckily, Glenn and Russ already formed a nice zig zag that I thought worked.
Next, translating what I’ve practiced in miniature to the larger canvas:
The wash was done by mixing Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna, leaning towards the Sienna so it was warmer or a little more brown. Here, I’m structuring the painting with those armature lines, the outline of each big shape, and then filling in the shapes with the dark and light values. As I keep saying in just about every blog post, most of the “hard work” felt done at this point, as I could solely focus on mixing and blocking in colors next.
Blocking In Color:
Planes of Greens, Blues, Browns, and Grays
Intentionally Mixing & Filling in Big Shapes with Color
The shapes of this painting are fairly large and obvious. For this phase, I mixed piles of the greens, blues, browns, and grays, then filled the shapes on the canvas with those color notes.
A few of the main colors are pretty desaturated (fleshtones, grays, some of the blue), so it did take some time mixing each to get the right chroma. It's easier for me to mix more saturated colors (say, the green wall hit with light). The underpainting made it easy to get the right lightness or darkness of all colors, per usual.
I did take this time to mix dark gray and map out the tufts on Glenn’s neck and chest. Most are variations of triangles, keeping it simple. I knew it would be easy to waste time in this area, getting too caught up in detail and getting confused. Best to distill complicated parts into simpler shapes.
What’s on my pallet?
- Titanium White
- Burnt Sienna
- Ultramarine Blue
- Indian Yellow
- Yellow Ochre
- Bright Red
- Sap Green
- Cobalt Blue Hue
Of these colors, I used the first 3 for most of the painting. I used Cobalt to modify Ultramarine so it’s slightly less reddish, and use that mixture in Russ’s shirt (which has a fair amount of white in it).
I mixed Yellow Ochre and Indian Yellow into Russ’s beard (after laying in plain brown), as well as the hue of Glenn’s hair (due to the tint of the lighting), and the greenish wall color. Additionally, I added a little ochre in the stair molding, because it's an earthy off white. I used Sap Green for that wall. The Red was only used slightly for the rosy flush and the scattered light making Russ’s nose and bottom lip reddish.
Glenn was a boring mix, sorry to say (I should have given him a rainbow bowtie or something). He’s gray, which is half white, half a muted mix of Sienna and Ultramarine (Brown + Blue). More white and a little Indian Yellow or Cad for the lighted parts.
Painting Challenges & Solutions:
The Insufferable Job of Rendering Hair. Overworking the Sensitive Color of Skin. Restructuring a Cat Face.
Glenn’s hair was the hardest to render, especially around the chest where the plane of his body is parallel to the light source, because that angle brings out textures to an extreme (many variations of highlighted hairs against shadows).
On top of that, mixing gray a lot is pretty boring. But, I needed to keep mixing the same pile of gray paint and modifying it with warm and cool colors slightly. Then pushing and pulling those textured areas until they looked right enough.
Fleshtones (creepy word, yea) are more fun to mix over and over, in my opinion. Probably a human bias (sorry Glenn). But it’s easy to see errors in fleshtones, and just that profile of the face needed a few corrections to get the lit, desaturated color without looking pallid, sick, dead, etc. However, the human eye (mine, anyway) is definitely more acute to errors in human skin tones, and so I couldn’t leave Russ’s face up to the imagination as much as Glenn’s hair.
Glenn has an aesthetically good looking feline face (in contrast, I can think of many a cat with a smooshed snout) and there were a lot of interesting shapes when drawing and painting his face. Despite my sketches and underpainting, I still got the proportions and alignment of his face wrong when translating it to the canvas.
When this fundamental structural error happens to the main subject, it particularly freaks me out. But paint can be painted over. Or scraped off and wiped, if necessary. I went back to my reference image, sketches, and redid it.
I also had to correct a few other shapes and proportions: Russ’s nose (a particularly identifiable part of his silhouette), the angle of the stair molding, and the shape of the couch/beanbag/pillow…honestly, I don't know what that is. A piece of furniture that I turned into a marshmallow. Perhaps its cat bed. A throne for Glenn.
Final Impression and Lessons Learned:
Structural Errors Can Survive Good Prep. Some Sections Will Be Harder to Render Than Others. What Subjects Create Interest When Next to Each Other?
On this one, I learned that I still can’t be too confident just because thumbnail sketches go well. Or the subsequent underpainting is seemingly translated well. I can still make errors after all of that. Correcting shapes is still needed no matter how perfect my prep is.
Next, I learned some images may naturally have useful armature lines to guide the viewer’s eye. Moving subjects around in Photoshop may not always be necessary, or a crop of the image might be all that’s needed to create interesting shapes.
Additionally, highlighted caucasian fleshtones are super sensitive (...sssuper ssssensitive…), and should be mixed efficiently, unless I want to feel frustrated and discontented. Probably true for any light color, I guess. Also, messy textures at the terminator zone, where light runs nearly 180 degrees to a surface, can get complicated and need to be mapped out and broken down. Otherwise, the texture or pattern will be too dang complicated for me to paint, and probably unappealing for viewer’s to look at.
Structurally, animal faces next to human ones really highlight our anatomical distinctions. I would guess a composition with a human next to an animal would be more interesting for viewers compared to just an animal portrait or just a portrait of a person. Or, maybe that’s just my preference. I do find anatomy interesting, after all.
In January, this painting arrived safely at my cousin’s home a few states away…a little late for Christmas. Excited to see where they’ve hung it up…
…hopefully, not above a shrine of Glenn…
