This is the first post in which I describe what I have actually been up to, art-wise, since I started this blog. I have basically dedicated my free time this summer to painting... Unfortunately, in practice I have not had as much free time as I had planned, and I have been too irresponsible with that time. Isn't that how it always goes.
My main goal right now is to get good at portraits. If you've looked at my older posts, you've seen my portrait of my sister, which is, as far as I can tell, pretty good. That's just one portrait though, and replicating those results has proven more difficult than I would like to admit. My next few posts will chronicle my portrait-making, including some... well, failures. (I don't care what your second-grade art docent told you; there most certainly is such a thing as a "mistake" in art.)
The portrait you see above is of my friend Ally, who shared a photo her friend took that she liked (check out her photographer friend's work here), and I was like "that would make an awesome painting." Was I right? Probably, but I'm not sure my painting is evidence of that fact. *lulz* So as not to dive into a portrait of someone else (who might be offended if I screwed up), I decided to work on a self-portrait at the same time. The following self-portrait was done just by looking in a mirror while painting, which turned out to have some serious problems, which I'll describe as I go. Process-wise, I alternated steps; one step of my self-portrait, then the same step of Ally's portrait, then the next step of my self-portrait, and so on. I'd like to think that process worked, because my portrait of Ally, while not perfect, is waaaaaay better than my final self-portrait. I'll discuss the two paintings separately though, rather than strictly chronologically.
Oh, I forgot, the only record I have of the initial steps of this one is a few crappy Instagram photos. (Incidentally, you can follow me on Instagram by clicking on the "follow me on" link on the right side of the page. Though honestly, except for the occasional unfinished artwork, it's really mostly just pictures of my cat.)
What you see in this picture is technically the second or third layer, depending on what you count; I started with an imprimatura (a very thin wash of just one or, in this case, two, colors that either are totally arbitrary or block out very vague areas of the painting) and a charcoal drawing. After spraying some fixative on the charcoal drawing, I just threw down some blocks of color with a palette knife. This does a few things: It adds some texture to the painting, since using a palette knife tends to leave more three-dimensional surfaces in the paint; and it sets up areas of warm or cool color. The left side of my face (which is in this case also the side on the viewer's left, since I painted via a mirror--confused yet?) was lit by warm sunlight, whereas the right side of my face was lit by cool reflected light. Fun lighting fact: that's the same light pattern you'd see indoors with incandescent lights, but the opposite pattern you'd see in the shade, on a cloudy day, or indoors through a window that provides indirect sunlight.
Aside from the basic concept of using an underpainting to establish basic values and warm/cool relationships, my technique here is frankly pretty weird. I used this wildly experimental process for a couple reasons: 1.) I liked the results I got on my mythology painting, for which I used the same process, and (perhaps more importantly) 2.) I have no idea how real oil painting works, but I know underpainting is involved, so...
Okay, so I do sort of know how oil painting works, but my instinct is always to try and be too experimental at first, then trip over myself until I get humbled and start doing things the "right" way. Hence the title of this post, which is inspired by a Tony Stark quote, "Sometimes you gotta run before you can walk," which is probably originally from somebody real, but since a very cursory review of the top like 5 Google search results wouldn't tell me who that somebody was, I'm going to just admit I got it from Iron Man. Anyway, the point is that I think there is some truth to that concept--sometimes you really need to just throw yourself into something without really knowing what you're doing. The more I tried to do with this first self-portrait, the more walls I would run into--the more I would learn about where my limits are: what I'm bad at, what I need to work on. In this particular work, I found lots of walls.
(Look, this one even has an Instagram filter on it!) You can see several of those walls emerging. here. To just completely rip myself apart: Both sides of the face are equally well-lit in this painting, which is ridiculous. Sometimes that does happen in real life, but 1.) not usually and 2.) when that does happen it makes for a pretty lousy painting and it means you should probably rearrange either your subject or the lighting. As a result of my inattention to value (light vs. dark), my face looks almost completely flat--more like a pug or an exotic than a human. You may also note that I started painting my beard way too dark, that I gave myself this weird upturned nose that looks like I either got punched really hard in the face, or that I am actually Voldemort.
In the final product, I did manage to solve some of the more glaring problems with my middle layer, but I left others unsolved (pug nose) and created a few new ones (weirdly dark eyelashes and mouth... seam? wtf do you call that), including a weird Simon Dewey-esque glow. Lots of people love Simon Dewey, and he's one of those people who's weird to criticize because he's painting Jesus and all that, but really Simon--there is more than one texture in this universe than semi-translucent satin. Anyway, the final result here is that I look like a flat-faced, pug-nosed, ancient Mormon apostle, which is cool if you are into that thing but I am really not. I probably could have fixed some of these problems (added a dark glaze over the shaded side of my face to round things out; glazed over the weird black lines with a more realistic brownish color, as I did on the portrait of Ally you'll see below; just plain painted over the tip of the nose), but at this point I figured it would probably be more productive to just start a new self-portrait from scratch. As you'll see in my next post, I did just that--five times, and counting. Since I have no intention of ever actually showing this painting publicly, there just wasn't any point in fixing it. Sometimes you just have to cut your losses.
* * *
Here's the underpainting for my portrait of Ally. I'm pretty sure it's actually cooler than the final product... Good thing I took a good photo of it, so I can make a print if I want. This one is less about warm/cool relationships and more about just throwing some interesting colors onto the canvas to give the final product some depth. You may not feel like you see any of this when you look at the final product, but most paint is at least a little transparent, so the colors do affect the upper layers. Also, brushed tend to not completely cover the area you brush over with them, so little pieces of the underpainting do tend to peek through the upper layers--especially if you exaggerate that effect on purpose, which I tend to do. The easiest place to see these factors taking effect is in the background, where even in the final product you can see some red--I didn't add any red to the background after my original imprimatura.
My goal for this layer was basically to cover my crazy abstract painting with as realistic a style as I could. Of course, because this is just how I work, I couldn't resist exaggerating some of the light/dark relationships. In a good dynamic photograph or live setup, there is actually very little "skin color" on a model; the midtones are more or less what you think of as the overall color of the skin, but the shadows are often purple or blue or gray, and the highlights are usually just whatever color the light source is. So I used a lot of blue, purple, and orange in this layer, and very little of the actual color you think you are seeing when you look at Ally in person. (Color is weird and complicated, guys.) The colors on the jeans, stool, and hair are obviously a little more straightforward. In some ways this layer almost looks like it could be a final painting, which is why I decided to mostly cover it with a transparent glaze, rather than with another thick layer of paint. However, there were a few problem areas: The lines between the toes make no sense; there is not enough detail on the face; and the "corners" (the places on the wrist and elbow where the bone is directly under the skin) on the right arm (the one on top) are way too dark compared to the rest of the arm. So I still needed to use thick paint in a few places.
Another nice Instagram photo for you--which I edited in paint and somehow didn't edit out the bookmark bar. It's too late now, laziness has won this battle. Anyway, I was completely disappointed in this layer of the painting. The dullness of this photo is mostly due to taking a lousy cellphone photo, but if you look closely you can see that I actually made the feet look a lot worse, not better. I also somehow gave the face this weird zombie stare. Those are the main problems with it.
At this point I was pretty much ready to just give up, call it a failure, and send Ally a print of the underpainting instead of the original painting. (Incidentally, so far I have done neither. For reasons.) Fortunately, though your second-grade art docent was ultimately wrong about there being no such thing whatsoever as a mistake in art, she also did have a point about not immediately giving up when something doesn't look great. After a couple days of frustrated despair, I went back over the glaze with some more realistic colors on the face (exactly what I would have done to fix the gnarly eyelashes and mouth in my self-portrait, if I cared), and completely repainted the feet. You can scroll back up to the top of the post to see the final product, which is by no means perfect, but also not some embarrassing failure.
After these two experimental paintings, equipped with some experience running headfirst into metaphorical walls, I catalogued my mistakes and limitations and set out to overcome them. More on that in my upcoming posts.