Quent Cordair Fine Art

Finally the shirt was dry, and it was time to paint that right arm. Well, almost. The shorts still wanted painting, and because they were so small an area and located to the right of the arm, I worked them in first. Finishing the arm completed the figure, always a psychological milestone. I always like this stage when the fully painted figure is popping out of the unfinished background.

However, I always like a completely finished painting much better…so I began work on the background. Even though the wall behind the figure is an extremely simple surface, Its still important that the lighting, particularly the cast shadows and the drop-off of light as the wall moves away from the window, match the lighting on the figure. I also put a little orange into the reflected light in the corner and toward the bottom right of the painting from the warm colors of the wood framing around the window and the carpet on the steps, again, to keep the light consistent throughout the entire composition. I took this photo from an angle reduce the glare off of the wet paint.

The carpet and the woodwork came next. I had pretty good reference photos for both, so they went quickly. Now that they are in place, the reflected oranges in the shadows on the wall make a lot more sense visually, as does the lighting on the figure’s right arm. I also painted the bright white edge of the window casing which is directly lit by the primary light source. Speaking of primary light sources, rather than the bright daylight that was in my reference photos, I decided to put a view of deep space outside to allude to what the boy was day-dreaming of as he gazed out the window. The first step was to block in the window with flat, ivory black and let it dry. The stars and a little hint of nebula gasses will be glazed in later.

In the extreme foreground, the globe was the final object left to paint. I thought the ochres and browns of an antique globe better fit the overall color scheme of the painting, and went with the retro design of the rocket, but the prop I had available was a ten dollar contemporary cardboard globe in a plastic armature, so I had to wing it. I started by blocking in the oceans to work out the coloring and give myself a sense of the spherical form of the globe.

Next I dropped in the rough shapes of the continents, political boundaries, legends etc. moving around a lot to keep everything consistent and letting the details remain loose. I also added a few highlights to indicate the textures of the antique globe.

I always prefer a brass armature to plastic in my antique globes. Who doesn’t? So using the lighting from the reference photos and drawing the coloring from several images of brass objects under various lighting conditions, I did my best to fake one. I think it worked out pretty well.

Once that was finished, I put a thin glaze of linseed oil, ivory black and burnt sienna over the black of the window. Into that glaze I painted a suggestion of some simple nebula gasses and a star field. I really like the effect even though it may not make perfect sense lighting wise. It’s much more romantic.

As excited as I was about this painting throughout the entire process, I was still pleasantly surprised how well it turned out…definitely my personal favorite so far. The extra time taken to do the under-painting really paid off in the end, and I think the lighting has a natural, intimate feel. I think the limited palate works well with the subject matter as well. This one was a little hard to crate up and ship off to the gallery, so I’m looking forward to getting a print for myself in the not too distant future.

Thanks for reading the Artist’s Studio! Please write in with any questions or comments on this painting, or any other art related topic.

Cheers!

A shirt and some hair

I was itching to finish the flesh tomes by painting the right arm. However, because the arm completely overlaps the shirt, it made much more sense to paint the shirt first. I started by dropping in a few rough blocks of color based on the values of the under-painting…

…and then worked them together adding shadow and form-light until folds of the fabric looked right.

I continued that process over the next couple of days until the entire shirt was finished.

Still itching to paint that last arm, I put it off once again because the cerulean blue pigment in the shirt was taking so long to dry. While I waited, I thought, “Why not just paint the hair?” So I did.

Unfortunately, by the time I had finished, I had been looking at the painting for so long that I couldn’t tell whether or not I liked the way it was turning out. The hair just seemed crazy, and I was tempted to scrape it off and start again. Fortunately, there is a centuries old trick for getting a fresh perspective on your painting-in-progress: look at it in a mirror. Or, these days, snap a photo with your phone and flip it horizontally so you can obsessively check it every ten minutes for a day or so until you have decided if it looks right. I did that:

After said day or so (and a good night’s sleep), I decided the hair looked just fine after all.

Beginning the over-painting

Now for the fun part…okay, the other fun part: the over-painting. The bit everyone else gets to see. I like to start figures by painting the face. It establishes the mood and the personality of the painting right off the bat, and gives me something to relate the other flesh tones to. With the under-painting already in place, picking values was considerably easier and, as a bonus, once the face was painted it didn’t have that disconcerting ‘Floating Head ’feel that many of my pieces often do at this stage.

Continuing with the flesh tones, and using the coloring of the face as a reference, I started work on the left arm. I’m working right to left across the canvas mainly to keep my hand out of the wet paint.

I kept moving left until the arm was finished, and then, since the section of the left leg that is exposed behind the globe was so small, I decided to finish it too. It turns out that this made the subtleties of the interaction between the arm and the knee much easier to capture. Soft things, like skin, tend to have soft edges, and soft edges are far better made with wet paint.

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At some point while working on the arm, I made the decision to paint the toy rocket before moving on to the rest of the figure. Why? Whenever two objects are close to each other, they reflect light back and forth and influence the colors and shadows of each other. It had been beneficial enough working the knee and arm together that I thought I may as well do the same with the hand and rocket. Also, rockets are cool, and fun to paint. Anyway, I think the rocket turned out great, and I think the interaction between the hand and the rocket feels really genuine. I probably wouldn’t have given the matter so much consideration, but in the reference photos the model was not holding this toy rocket.

Small sections of partially hidden anatomy can be really tricky to paint. The structure of the knee is at the same time complex and familiar. So, even though half of the kneecap is hidden, most viewers would know something was wrong if it were in the wrong place. It took a lot of adjusting and then standing back thinking, “Knee?” before I was satisfied.

Under-painting

Because I wanted the lighting for this painting to be quite dramatic, I decided to use a technique I haven’t used in years…an under-painting. An under-painting is basically a monochromatic painting of the entire composition that goes underneath the full-colored layers of paint that make up the final image. Why go to all the work? The under-painting allows me to lay out all of the values for the painting ahead of time, and much as the careful drawing saves me time later by solving all of the shape, proportion, perspective and line problems, it saves me time by solving all of the lighting problems. Between the drawing and the under-painting, all that I really have to worry about as I paint the over-painting is the color.

In order to keep things archival, an under-painting has to follow the rich over lean rule. In general, no layer of paint should have a higher oil content than the one that goes on top of it. This helps prevent cracking of the top layers of paint. For the same reason, it is also a good idea to try and use quick-drying pigments that are flexible when dry in lower layers of paint. Keeping these two things in mind, I used Burnt Umber, Raw umber and a little Ivory Black, all thinned with turpentine as opposed to linseed oil. Because the canvas was already tinted slightly, and because the pigment mix I used was not quite as dark as pure black, I also left myself a little room to tweak the shadows and really pop a few highlighted areas.

As you can see, the under-painting is a fairly complete image. I can tell exactly what’s going on, and already have a feel for how the light is going to work. I actually really like the effect too…it has a lovely antique sort of feel to it.

‘Navigator’ Artist’s Studio Steps

Step 1: Preparation

Welcome back to The Artist’s Studio! I have recently completed what I can honestly say is one of my personal favorite paintings, ‘Navigator’. It’s development represents what, to me, is an almost ideal progression for an artist working in my style, and as such, I thought it would be an interesting piece to walk through from conception to completion. It may sound strange, although it has happened to me several times, but the idea for this painting actually occurred to me while shooting scrap for another painting. The details of the other composition are best left for later (particularly if they do eventually become a painting of their own), but the essential details are as follows.

I had assembled various props for a photo-shoot with my daughter as the model. My daughter, at the time, was just under three years old…a particularly difficult age to work with in general, as any parent will verify, but specifically so as far as modeling for paintings is concerned. I have found that it is often useful to have a ‘Model Wrangler’ on hand for such endeavors….meaning, a person who is not me, who the model can interact with, and who can take cues from me as to how to influence the mood and actions of the model. In this case, the “Model Wrangler’ was my son, seven years old, and a favorite person of my daughter. I will skip over the mundane and numerous detail of the progression of events. In summary, at one point my son was demonstrating a pose that might look like fun for my daughter to take, just so…in front of the window. The props were different, but the pose and the lighting suddenly suggested to me a vague idea I had kept on the back burner for some years: a young boy aspiring to travel the stars. Anyone familiar with my work should know I am an admitted space nut, and an eternal optimist. The two characteristics are bound to lead to composition like this one. Anyway, I immediately let my daughter have a break, rummaged through the house for appropriate props, and shot a dozen or so photos of my son. This charcoal sketch was the first actual composition to result:

I loved the idea, but wasn’t really sold on the actual composition…at least not from a visual standpoint. I had almost resolved to re-shoot the scrap (artist jargon for photographic reference material), when I realized that cropping the scene into a square solved almost every compositional problem. Golden-mean ratios popped up everywhere, diagonals throughout the composition all seemed to line up, and I got a really nice division between lights and darks that appealed to me. Using one photograph as the basis for the pose, and multiple others as details for hands, globe, and star-scape etc., I came up with the following to-scale drawing:

One of my favorite canvas sizes is 18 inches by 30 inches. It makes for a nice, midrange painting with good aspect ratios in both landscape and portrait configurations…and I had several blank canvasses of that size on hand. But this time, I needed a square. It just so happened that I had four stretcher bars hanging around in the studio which had been intended for canvasses that I never ended up stretching. There had, historically, been eight…four of them provided the bones for ‘Study for the Triumph of Icarus’ in 2009…my most recent square composition. I found a scrap of linen, stretched and primed a 20×20 surface, and using an oil transfer technique I moved my scale drawing from paper to the new canvas: