Oil Painting on Cotton Canvas, October 2023
Reference and Inspiration:
Finding Any Subject with Good Composition: An Ordinarily Boring Group of Objects During Sunrise
One day I noticed the way the sun shone in my apartment at sunrise, and I snapped a few photos of regular ol’ objects that had interesting light and shadow effects over them. The “interesting” time of day and a cropping of the photo was all that was needed for good composition.
Over the past year, I have tried to push myself to find better compositions. Whether that be finding better reference photos, playing more with image editing (i.e., more cropping variations; adjusting hue, saturation, brightness), or just taking notes on what's worked for composition before in oil painting. On that note, I highly recommend the book Mastering Composition by Ian Roberts. His YouTube channel has a lot of similar takeaways in video form, too.
For this one, my laundry door and table created interesting angles and sharp differences in light and shadow. I saw a nice balance of shapes, darks, midtones, and saturated highlights. Because of that, I decided to move forward with painting it.
The Wash and Underpainting:
Using Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna to Draw the Right Lines and Values
The wash of the canvas and underpainting were made with Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna to make a grayish-brown. I used varying opacities to place in the right levels of darks and lights.
Of all the art I’ve created this year, this painting really showed me the value of a single-color wash and underpainting. It helped me to see how the bold shapes of darks, midtones, and highlights contrast with the gradient on the carpet. I don’t think I would have been able to understand and appreciate the relationships of those value shifts/changes without it. After the underpainting, I realized I was 50% finished (or more) just with that down.
Blocking In Color:
Paint Mixing & Filling in Shapes with Color Notes of Orange, Yellow, Blue, Pink, and Beige
The underpainting took care of nearly all dark colors. Following that, I only needed to focus on the lights and midtones. Using a pallet knife, I mixed the desaturated lights (brightest), the saturated lights (the most identifiable colors), and the midtone neutral colors.
This is one of those orange-blue works of art where the contrast in temperature is turned up to eleven. I notice a lot of those extreme warms and cools in movie posters, and my guess it’s visually exciting or attention grabbing or both. Anyway, the obvious temperature difference also kept my attention when mixing paint for this.
What’s on my pallet?
Painting Challenges & Solutions:
Long Straight Lines, Sharp Angles & Boring Neutral Colors
I don’t know about other artists, but my brain doesn’t translate what I see as perfectly as a printer does, and this part of the process showed me how my mind wants to turn straight lines into curved or jagged ones. Or make angles too wide or too narrow.
I really didn’t achieve the straight lines, because I’m now cringing at the waves in some of them as I look at the painting after the fact. I painted over them many times, again and again. They looked straight when I finished. Oh well.
The neutrals were hard to mix, being nondescript and boring. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on them. I guess that makes me sound like a squirrel-minded person, but it’s the truth. Because the saturated colors were so fun and easy to mix, I’m guessing that made it harder for me to care about the neutrals. I just had to constantly compare the paint to my reference photo until I got them right. I ended up spending THE MOST time on them.
Final Impression and Lessons Learned:
Simple Shapes Are All You Need. Extreme Temperatures Make Boring Subjects Interesting.
One of the fun jobs of oil painting is finding a subject to focus on and a composition that will make it work as art. For example, I may find a pretty landscape photo, but need to crop it or move parts around in Photoshop to optimize it for the viewer’s eyes. But a good subject doesn’t have to be epic or complicated. Good art can be of simple stuff.
I don’t know if this is good art. But, I think it works well. While the literal content of the subject isn’t interesting, the crop and the extreme temperatures composed the subject so that it became interesting. The simple lines, shapes, and value relationships almost make it look like an abstract. I’ve already been collecting a few other images like this: simple household objects in extreme lighting from sunset or sunrise. I think it could work as a basis for a series.
