Quent Cordair Fine Art

The sort of pseudo-engineering of the wings and their mechanical harness was one of the most fun aspects of working on this little study. I say pseudo-engineering, because I am fully aware of the impossibility of this setup actually allowing anyone, regardless of their physical strength, to glide…much less achieve powered flight. All I was after was a design that looked somewhat plausible and, more important, looked cool. For me, the mechanical nature of the wings is everything. The important part of the story is Daedalus using his ingenuity to defy the gods and the fates. Wings grafted onto Icarus’ back with no visible hint of their operating parts would never have flown…so to speak. Having said all of that, I do plan on modifying this design slightly when I get around to the final painting mainly by increasing the wingspan by at least a third, and perhaps revealing a little mechanical articulation at the main joints in the wings.

Also in this first image, you will note the completion of Icarus’ wee toga, complete with trailing drapery in the style of all good paintings of Greek myth. Sadly, for compositional reasons, and violation of the plausible direction of airflow during our hero’s descent, the trailing drapery’s part in this painting is to be short lived. Even so, painting the toga was an entertaining exercise. My model, as you may imagine, was not so draped during out little photo shoot. In fact, he was wearing the modern day equivalent (a paint of tasteful boxer briefs) which would have been completely anachronistic and considerably less graceful in the painting. So I had to improvise. Certainly I could mock-up some sort of reference for the final painting; though I think I pulled this temporary fix off well enough.
At this point, I was itching to get to painting the wings. However, being the patient painter that I am, I decided to finish the figure first. All that remained was the legs. As with the rest of the figure, my model’s physique provided me with way more information than I could possibly fit into a painting, especially a smallish-sized study such as this. So, working on the legs was as much an exercise in selecting essential details as it was in mixing colors and values. Here is an image of the first leg I completed (the figure’s left)…

…and one of the complete figure, awaiting his wings:

Next I moved on the torso, working in the same fashion as with the arm. Again, the amount of detail available in the reference photos was far greater than would be appropriate for the painting, so I tried to carefully select just those details that would get the job done without going over the top. Even so, you can see there is a lot going on. Here is where the careful and accurate work on the drawing and the transfer really pays off. Since I’ve already figured out where everything goes, how big each muscle is, and how they all fit together, all I have to worry about is color and value…which is plenty…believe me. Not only does each individual form have to turn in space, but the torso as a whole has to appear round.

After the torso was finished, I continued on to the right arm.
All of the flesh tones were basically dry within two days. I decided to paint the leather straps across the chest and around the wrists, as well as the hair before continuing work on the rest of the figure. I didn’t have any scrap for the leather, and I changed the hair enough from the photos that I basically had to wing it there as well. It took a lithe bit of tweaking and adjusting, but in the end I think it worked out pretty well. This photo is obviously not the best, but you get the idea.

The main point of the study may be resolving lighting and design issues with the wings, but it is also a good excuse to do a little figure painting. Besides, the better the rendering of the lighting and color on the figure, the better correlation I can achieve with the lighting and color on the wings.
I started with the face and left arm, since it’s easier for a lefty like me to work from top to bottom and right to left whenever possible. My main goal here is to sculpt the figure, paying special attention to their orientation to the light source, to achieve the illusion of the shapes and forms curving away in space. The model for Icarus was particularly fit. When setting up to shoot the scrap, I had him pull against a wooden pole behind his back to activate the correct muscles in his chest and arms. After a minute or two, the amount of detail visible in the striations of muscle and network of veins was incredible. When painting from such highly detailed reference material, the trick is always to pull out just enough information to get the point across without allowing the details to become more important than the overall form.
I have had many questions about Icarus’ facial expression while working on this painting. To answer a few of the most common, Icarus is looking down because he is negotiating a landing. While it may not be completely apparent in this smaller, more quickly painted version, his expression is one of concentration, and he is breathing out with the strain of hauling against the wings to stop his forward momentum as he touches down. The expression is actually very well represented in the scrap, since by the end of the photo shoot the model was breathing harder with the strain of pulling against the dowel and holding his weight on his bent right leg.

There are many methods available for transferring a finished drawing, sometimes called the cartoon, onto the canvas, panel, ceiling, or whatever other surface an artist may choose to work on. Often, the final painting is designed to be much larger than is convenient for working out the details of the drawing. This is usually the case for me. When it is, I have most often used a grid system to simultaneously transfer the drawing and blow it up to the correct size. Other painters may use a projector or a large format photocopy machine and a charcoal or paint direct transfer.
With this study, I originally intended to paint on an 18 inch square canvas, well within the size range for drawing full scale. In the end, however, I ended up opting for a slightly larger canvas, 20 X 20. I decided to make use of available technology, and took my finished drawing to Kinko’s where I enlarged it to 20 X 20 and lightened the lines. Fortunately, I had the foresight to make a couple copies. I first employed the old standby for direct transfer, a charcoal transfer. I’ve used this trick many times with great success. Basically, you coat the back of your drawing with a nice even coat of charcoal. Then the drawing is carefully taped into place on the canvas. By carefully tracing over the drawing with a nice sharp pen, the drawing is pressed onto the canvas.

The only drawback to this method is that not only is the transferred image likely to smear or brush off, the charcoal can also tint the paint that is applied over it. So the drawing has to be fixed in some way. The best way, though by far the most time consuming, would be to trace over the drawing with thinned paint or india ink. The easiest is a light pass with a fixative. This works well enough, but is not exactly archival. I decided to try a light coat of dammar retouch varnish. This fixed the drawing, but not for long. Since this was meant to be a quick lighting and design study for the wings, I originally intended to leave the background unfinished. Rather than have the figure surrounded by a field of plain, flat gray, I hoped to put a nice warm, mottled wash of burnt umber over the canvas before I started painting. Unfortunately, the wash lived up to its name and completely washed the dammar coated drawing away. The color and texture it left on the canvas were lovely though.

I decided to use the setback as an opportunity to work on perfecting what I think would be the absolute ideal in direct transfer, a technique I was exposed to at the Grand Central Academy, the oil transfer. I’ve tried this technique a few times before, and although it worked well enough to allow me to complete the paintings, it was sloppy and inexact. A perfect example is this oil transfer I used while painting ‘Contrast’:

You can see what I mean. The drawing is there, but the line quality is inconsistent and blurred. The painting turned out beautifully, but I had to stare at this ugly drawing the entire time I worked on it. More problematic, I had to spend much more time reconstructing details with paint that should have been worked out in the drawing. Very time consuming.
What I ended up doing was taking some ideas from the charcoal transfer and applying them to the oil transfer. It seems obvious now, but the problem was that in applying the thin layer of Burnt Umber oil paint to the back of the drawing, even with a nice stiff brush, the thickness of the coat was varying just enough to result in unpredictable transfer to the canvas. So, I applied the paint and then, as I would with charcoal, I spent 10 minutes carefully wiping down the paint layer with a paper towel, smoothing it out and working it into the paper. The resulting transfer was light, but perfectly crisp and as close to the original drawing as could ever be expected. Best of all, now the only materials on the canvas are oil colors. No charcoal, no retouch varnish, and certainly no fixative.

Burnt Umber is a ridiculously fast drying pigment, so I would be able to begin painting as early as the next day.

Step 1 (Icarus1)

Every once in a while, an idea is just big enough that it warrants a little more planning than usual.  Such is the case with a composition involving Icarus that I have had on the back burner for some years now.  Eventually, the painting will be a multiple-figure composition depicting Icarus landing triumphantly in Sicily to the amazement and relief of the onlookers.  Obviously I am taking a bit of artistic license with the original Greek story which goes something like this:
Daedalus, a famed inventor, problem solver and mere mortal is imprisoned with his young son on the island of Crete.  In order to escape, Daedalus spends years engineering and building a set of wings for himself and his son, Icarus which they will use to fly to Sicily.  Limited by the available materials, Daedalus fashions the wings using wax to attach the feathers to their framework.  By the time the wings are ready, Icarus is an adolescent.  As they prepare for their flight to freedom, Daedalus warns Icarus of the design limitations of their flight apparatus:  Fly too close to the water, and the feathers will get wet and become too heavy to fly.  Fly to close to the sun and the wax will melt resulting in a fatal fall to the ocean below.  In the original story, Icarus is overcome with the ecstasy of flight and, forgetting his father’s warning, flies too close to the sun and falls to his death.  In my version, Icarus respects the physical limitations of his father’s wings and successfully makes the trip to Sicily.
I will leave the details of the final painting for an Artist’s Studio installment in the future.  This study will be a much smaller painting featuring only the figure of Icarus and an extremely simplified background.  Why the study?  While in New York last summer attending a seminar at the Grand Central Academy, I met a model who perfectly fit the bill for my image of Icarus.  I took the opportunity to shoot some very excellent scrap of him posing as if just touching down from flight.  Of course, he wasn’t equipped with wings, and shooting the scrap on the fly in an unfamiliar studio, I had no opportunity to come up with even the crudest mock-up for the reference photos.  As a result, I am painting this study to work out the design of the wings, their coloration, texture, attachment to the figure and the lighting so that when I get around to painting the final piece everything will fall right into place.
The first step was to do a sketch of the figure from several pieces of reference material and then work a rough idea of the wing design into the drawing.  The figure and even the design of the wings don’t have to be absolutely perfect at this point…just close enough that any work on the lighting etc. will translate smoothly over to the final composition.  This is the drawing I ended up transferring to the canvas…an adventure in and of itself.  Stay tuned….