Studio-less

Well I survived the holiday season but in all the craziness I have lost my studio. I know many artists face this disruption periodically to their work and hopefully it is just a temporary set back. I am now in a small apartment with no room for art supplies. I was finally making some great progress on working through my critical blocks and I am trying to see this as just a detour for now. The choice to not return to the studio was mine after a break up with my boyfriend who had unselfishly shared it with me, but for now it just seems we cant work this into a friendship. So for now I am studio-less at the same time I have a strong desire to paint. I wish that these cycles would someday align so that I have a strong desire to be creative at the same time I actually have a working studio to do it! That would be nice! But for now I find myself twisting in the winds. I am excited about returning to teaching. This week I started back teaching a night class on basic graphic design. It feels wonderful to be around creative people again. I have really struggled with missing teaching, and giving up a few nights a week to teach is small compared to the benefits to me as an artist. I get so much creative energy from my students, they fill my creative well! I remember a saying a close friend of mine used to tell me “You want to make God laugh, tell him/her your plans”.

Gradient mesh demo in Illustrator

Gradient mesh demo
One of the trickiest tools to master in Illustrator is the gradient mesh tool but when used correctly it can produce stunning results. There are some tricks to using the gradient mesh with reference photos that will allow you to use the existing color in the photo directly onto the mesh. The technique is simple to use once you understand it. The real issue here is that it soon becomes monotonous so I usually work on a gradient mesh illustration while Im watching a good movie to relieve the boredom!

This tutorial is assuming that you know how to handle the pen tool in illustrator to draw simple shapes. We will be using the pen tool, the direct selection tool, the gradient mesh tool and the eyedropper. It helps if you get used to the shortcuts for these tools as you will be switching between them a lot. Direct Selection tool (A) eyedropper (I), gradient mesh tool (U). Other useful shortcuts to know are switching between outline and preview mode (Command/control Y) and applying fill (Option/alt delete).

Now choose a reference photo to start with, pick something easy with simple color. A basic photo of an apple or bowl or any single object will do. Open the photo in illustrator and then lock layer 1. Make a new layer to start working on.

The first step is to use the pen tool to draw a series of shapes that define the reference image. Break these up into smaller shapes that correspond to any divisions in the object or changes in direction or shape. It is important to make sure that they shapes overlap so you can get as seamless transition between mesh areas.

Once you have defined the basic shapes associated with your photo, it is time to create the gradient mesh. The only function of the gradient mesh tool is to add or delete mesh lines and points. That’s all. Start with one of your shapes and using the gradient mesh tool, click diagonally across the shape. Each click will add a horizontal and vertical mesh line. Don’t worry you can add and delete mesh lines anytime so it doesn’t have to be perfect. Try to keep the mesh lines evenly spaced if possible but you will need more mesh lines in areas where the color changes a lot and less in areas of flat, unchanging color.

To add a new mesh grid just click. To delete a mesh line, select the line and press alt/option when clicking with the mesh tool. If you delete a point it will delete both the horizontal and vertical mesh lines. If you only want one of the lines deleted, make sure to click on the line in between two points.

Now we are going to fill the entire shape with the most obnoxious color you can find. This step will be important to being able to see your progress. Using the selection tool, select the entire shape and apply a bright color to the entire shape. Now Im going to show you a neat shortcut, command/control Y will change the view from preview to outline. This will show a wireframe version of the mesh and allow you to see the color in the reference photo. To switch back into preview mode at anytime to see your progress just hit command/control Y again. Cool trick eh?

Now lets select an individual point in the mesh. Using the direct select tool (white arrow) make sure you are in outline mode. Click off of the shape off to the side of the artboard to make sure nothing is selected and then select one point. You can tell you only have a single point selected because it should be filled and the other points white.

Now switch to the eyedropper tool (I) and sample the color from the photo right next to the point you selected. To fill the point with that color hit option/alt and backspace/delete at the same time. The point should be filled, to check switch back into preview mode. Now you can see why we applied that obnoxious color, its so you can easily tell what points need to be filled still.

Switch back to outline mode and continue selecting points and applying color to them. I find it is easier to follow one of the lines vertically or horizontally. Be prepared for this to take a very, very long time.

If the color changes look choppy, add more mesh lines to get a smoother transition. When you blend one shape edge into another, I find it helpful to sample to color from the adjacent shape I am blending too rather than the original photo. That’s basically it…. Have fun!

Finished art in outline mode

Finished art in preview mode

Beginning digital painting

Sphere demo
This is a great way to try digital painting and to get used to two very different methods of digital painting, I will refer to them as glazing and direct painting. I find when teaching this to my students that it is about a 50/50 split as to which method the students prefer. Either method will produce beautiful results.

The reason I start with the sphere is so that students master the techniques on a simple object, but don’t let that fool you. A sphere is a very complex shape when you are first starting out. If you can mater shading a sphere smoothly then you will be well on your way to mastering digital painting. I often suggest students try the sphere exercise several times until they can do it smoothly.

The goal of this exercise is to master the values to produce the illusion that the sphere is three dimensional. If you have ever taken a drawing or painting class, you may have done this exercise before with more traditional materials. There are 6-7 values needed to turn a form and make it look round.

They are as follows:
1. Highlight
2. Halftone/midtone
3. Core shadow
4. Shadow mass
5. Reflect light
6. Cast shadow
These are the values we will be attempting to achieve in the exercises.

Glazing exercise
The glazing technique is similar to the early renaissance painters who would do a complete under-painting in shades of gray (grisaille) before starting the color. The color would then be lightly glazed over this under-painting. It is very important in this technique to fully finish the values of the sphere. You will spend most of your time working on this part. The color will be the easy part and comes later after the values are established completely.

To start, use the elliptical marquee to create a perfectly symmetrical selection (hold down shift while dragging the marquee). Fill this selection with a 50% gray value from your swatches. Lock this layer so you don’t accidently paint on it (we will use it later). Create a new layer to add your values.

To start applying color, choose a hard brush and set the opacity to 20% and the flow to 30% (you may adjust these values to suit your style of painting). Using the lightest gray start blocking in the highlight by hatching strokes of color over the top of the sphere where the imagined light would be hitting it. I then use black to start massing in the shadow values in the second half of the sphere. The midtone values will be 50% gray.

After you have hatched in some starting values, use the smudge tool (I like to set it at 50% pressure but play around with this to get the effect you like). Using the smudge tool, blend your hatching marks together into a smooth value. Apply more hatching marks in all values and continue to use the blend tool to smooth.

At first the values will be rough but after spending a lot of time hatching and smudging you will have a nice value sphere. Now it is time to clean up the edges and apply the color.

To clean up the edges of your sphere where you blended color over the edge, this technique works great. Control or command click on the thumbnail image of the original locked sphere layer. This should give you the oval selection you started with. Make sure you are on your painting layer. Invert the selection (shift command/control I) and then press backspace or delete to remove the overflowed color.

You will use this same selection to apply color to the sphere. Create a new layer and select the layer. Choose a color from the swatches for your sphere and alt delete or option delete to apply the color onto the new layer. Lower the opacity of this layer to glaze the sphere with color . Voila!

Direct Painting Exercise
This technique is very different as you will be applying the color from the beginning. Once again we will be starting with the elliptical marquee tool and making a perfectly round selection. Fill this selection with a midtone color, here I have used a middle brown. Lock this layer and create a new layer to paint on.

I should quickly point out how the color picker works for those not familiar with it. Each of the four corners contain a color/value as shown in the illustration. Start in the middle of the color picker for your initial value/color for the sphere. To increase or decrease intensity but to keep the same value move directly left or right, to increase or decrease the value move up or down. This is a very sophisticated tool for selecting color once you understand how to use it correctly.

You might also want to familiarize yourself with the spatter brush in Photoshop. It comes as a standard brush. You can see the texture it leaves. I usually experiment with my value/color combinations before I start a painting to establish a palette to work with. Then you can leave this file open and sample color directly from here as you paint.

Now select the spatter brush, set opacity to 50% and flow to 30%. I start out with spatter brushes to give the surface of the sphere (or anything) some texture to start out with. The complaint I have with many digital paintings is that the end result has no life and is too smooth. This provides some texture. With the spatter brush set at 50% opacity you will start applying color and value this time, so choose values that are lighter or darker then the overall value of the sphere. You will not be using the smudge tool in this example so keep away from it! All blending will be done by lowering the opacity of the brush.

After you have some values blocked in (light, shadow, midtone, reflect light) you can start dropping the opacity of your spatter brush so that the new strokes blend with the ones below. I will drop it to 25% and then 15% to get rough color.

After you get a good block-in you can switch to a soft brush at 20% opacity to smooth the sphere a bit but be careful not to get rid of all the texture. I have also added the complimentary color into the reflect light to spice things up a bit. Keep in mind this color needs to be part of the shadow so dont go too light. To clean up the edges of the sphere use the same technique of selecting the bottom circle, inverting the selection and deleting the edges.

Have fun!

painting composition – feedback please!

Im working through the composition for my latest project (yes I know I should have done this before I started) and I am trying to figure out what to have her holding in her hand. Ive worked out three possible compositions and would love your feedback!

Option 1
holding a skull

option 2
a ornate box

Option 3
an apple (cliche I know)

Feedback?

WIP portrait painting

Musings of a struggling artist

From my last update I have been spending what little free time Ive been able to sneak over the holidays working on my latest painting. It is still only half way done. I need to refine the blending more (It is still rough) and work on her shoulder in the shadow, her hands, the background, her hair, etc. Im debating what I want to put into her hand… what is she contemplating? But over all I am happy with the progress given that I destroyed the first attempt at this painting.

The angle of her face and features has proven challenging as has her hand against her face. It really is at an ugly awkward angle and I have tried to make it look much less awkward than it appears in the original. Im not happy with this painting yet but I do appreciate how much I have struggled to resolve some issues with it. It has become a learning piece more than a show piece Im afraid but such are the ups and downs of painting. You can view my previous journal entry for the first few stages of this painting. It is a wip.

New Photoshop digital painting tutorial – glance

This is another example of a digital painting done in Photoshop. Some interesting notes about this demo, which I gave to a class last year, is that the initial drawing was way out of perspective. As you can probably see I started the drawing with the mouth out of alignment to the rest of the figures but this allowed me to demonstrate how easy it is to make corrections in the digital world (I wish traditional painting was this easy). I purposely set this up as an example of using compliemntary colors into the flesh tones, so you will see the use of a neutral orange in the flesh with purple in the shadows. This creates visual impact, more than if the flesh is a muddy brown in color. Try to see flesh as composed of actual color not just values of neutral brown and both your traditional and digital paintings will improve. Here I am using PS3 with a wacom tablet.

reference photo

Here is the reference photo I used, you will see that Im not interested in an exact copy but rather just the turn of the head in the pose.

Initial sketch

This is my sketch done with the pencil tool in PS. I did not use a grid and I will comment right here that I am against artists just using the refence photo and tracing it to get the sketch. My desire is to always be working at improving my drawing skills even if I am working digitally. You can see here the mistake I made in having the mouth to far to the right but I havent caught it yet!

Color block-in

I am now deciding on a palette for the painting. I usually will test colors on the painting and when I am satisfied with them I will add them to my working palette on the left. This way I can use the eyedropper to quickly sample colors from my palette. I also have the refernce photo up in a second window so I can see the color of the actual photo. Here I strongly advise you not to sample your colors from the reference photo. First off they will be wrong, ususally much to dark and muddy for you to use, the eyedropper is not as sensitive as your eye. Second, I am always striving to improve my ability to judge color. I am blocking in simple color using the spatter brush set to opacity of around 80%, the color will be pretty opaque since I am direct painting and I am not interested in blending at this point.

More color

Now I am adding the shadows much deeper and more intense in color than they will be in the final piece. Your color underneath needs to be much brighter than you think because it will tone down as you start to blend the skin tones over it. You can see my palette of colors off to the left growing as I add more color into the painting. I have also worked on one eye. For me it is important to get a sense of the eyes early on So I can visually connect to the painting and I get a sense of the mood of the subject. The white of the eye is never really white, it is a mix of flesh color and gray. I have also switched to using hard edged brushes here as well as some custom brushes I have made in Photoshop.

 

More Color 2

I have started to add some detail to the hair. You want to avoid drawing every strand of hair. Since most of her face will be in shadow, the only hairs I will add detail too are in the lights. The mouth is still screwed up here, testifiying to how hard it is to talk during a demo and concentrate on drawing! I am now using hard and soft brushes in PS. I use hard brushes where I need a hard edge and softer ones to blend one color over another. Try not to use just soft brushes or just hard ones, you want a combination of both. As I blend, I start dropping the opactity to 20-30% so that the color on top blends with the color below it. You can see the block in of the secong eye and compare it to the finished eye.

More color 3

Mouth is driving me nuts here but I still havent caught it in the demo! More blending with the soft brushes, using hard ones as needed to sharpen details. I have started to add some stray hairs in the base hair color. I have worked on the nose and mouth to add details and highlights.

More Color 4

Finally I have fixed the mouth!  As you can see I have avoided drawing every strand of hair. I have finished the final details. Now I suppose you are curious how I fixed the mouth.

Step 1

make a selection around the area you want to move/fix using the marque selection tool. You just need a simple selection becasue you will need to reblend the fixed area into the painting anyway.

Fixing Mouth 1

Then copy the selection to a new layer (cntrl J/cmd J).

Fixing Mouth 2

Then you can use the move tool to move the new layer you created to a new position.

Fixing Mouth 3

And finally I merge the layer I have moved with the layer below and blend them together. Voila!

Fixing Mouth 4

And this is the finished digital painting. Have fun!

Glance

jacob collins palette

Sorry it has taken me a few days to get back to those people who sent me emails about color but I had to dig out the book that had Jacob Collin’s palette. I found it in the back of Juliette Aristides book “classical painting atelier” which by the way is a fine book full of excellent examples of painters. I would recommend it just for the pictures if nothing else.

According to her jacob collins palette is
flake white
naples yellow
flesh ocher
transparent earth orange
raw sienna
burnt sienna
burnt umber
raw umber
alzarin crimson permanent
ivory black

My palette right now consists of yellow ochre, french vermillion, burnt sienna, burnt umber, white, ivory black, brown pink and the transparent earth orange.

beginning painting 101 – fiery underpainting portrait

I usually refer to this painting exercise in my classes as the fiery underpainting but the object here is to let the toned canvas work in your painting. The goal is to not cover up the toned canvas so that it shows through in the lights and especially the shadows. This technique was a standard of the old masters and the baroque painters. If you ever have the opportunity to look at one of Rubens paintings in person, you are most likely to see whole areas of the painting that are barely finished and consist of little more than lights thrown onto the toned canvas. This allows you to focus your efforts on the part of the painting which will be the focus point, and to let the shadows remain transparent. It is not necessary to bring every thing in the painting up to the same level of detail.

Since these are class demos, they of course are just loosely painted, and in reality I would avoid spending too much time on these or you will over work them. The point of the lesson is to learn to leave the toned canvas alone in the shadows. This technique works exactly like drawing on toned paper, the point is to let the value and tone of the canvas work for you. Refer to my toned paper article for information on working with toned paper.

I start this project with a toned canvas of burnt sienna in a middle value. I use burnt sienna because when thinned out it becomes like “fire”. Make sure to thin the paint down when you tone the canvas with liquin so that the burnt sienna looks like a thin wash.

Once the canvas is dry (usually good to prepare it the day before) I start my drawing with burnt sienna thinned with turpenoid and some liquin. It is important to get a sense of the drawing but to not overwork it in the shadows. Do not start building up value yet, we are only going to be painting the lights.

Next mix up several values of raw umber with a touch of burnt sienna to warm it up. I usually go ahead and create 5 values of this but you wont need anything darker than a value 7 – 8 since you wont be touching the shadows much. Starting in the shadows, I loosely drag a thin layer of paint into the darkest part of the shadows using my darkest value. Dont cover the entire shadows but leave the paint thin and broken so the toned canvas shows through. This is the beauty of the technique.

Next using your lighter values, work up the lights from the midtones to the highlights. Here you will be working with thicker paint, especially as you approach the highlights. The goal here is to still allow areas of the toned canvas to show through.

This example actually has too much of the toned canvas covered up for my liking, I should have stopped sooner. Since it was a demo for class it is rough but you can still see the technique.

A better example would be this one.

Here you can see much more of the toned canvas showing through in both the lights and the darks. It is a much better example of the technique. Let the color of the toned canvas work for you functioning as the lightest values in the shadows and as the midtone values in the lights, right before the shadow starts.

It is also advisable to work some of the background in early so that you can judge the values in the rest of the painting against the background. I usually use straight burnt umber for the background, letting some of the toned canvas show through.

Have fun!

progress and faith

After gesso-ing over my latest painting attempt in disgust and frustration I recently started it over again several weeks ago. It is smack in the middle of the ugly stages right now and the challenge for me is to have the faith to finish it. I have committed to myself that I will finish this piece regardless of the outcome. I am reminding myself that art is a spiritual process and I am bringing to life something that did not exist before, that the beauty is in the human hand and the imperfections that result.

I am enjoying working with my new palette and the subtle greens and neutrals that I am able to obtain with it in the skin tones. The drawing is more correct than my first attempt. I still need to work in the shadows of the far shoulder. The shadows and the face are still only blocked in now. I also need to fix the hand by the face, the webbing of the palm is too strong for my liking even though it is correct in regards to the reference photo.

Here is a the underpainting

and the progress so far.

life drawing portrait 11/16

life drawing from last 11/16. The challenge was to make the dreadlock ponytail on top of his head NOT look like a bush growing.