Breaking Through: Step 5
I used a grid to transfer the final to-scale sketch onto the canvas. The grid should be pretty hard to spot in these images, thanks to a handy little trick I picked up in the Artist’s Handbook (by Ralph Mayer). Incidentally, if you are an Artist yourself, or an aspiring Artist, or a really serious, geek-level art enthusiast and you don’t already have a copy of this hefty tome of art-related information, you should really consider picking one up. Anyway, the trick is to draw the grid with water-based color pencil, and then sketch the cartoon on to the canvas with oil-based pencil or charcoal. Once the drawing is complete, the grid can be carefully removed with a warm washcloth. This may sound ridiculously anal, but oil colors have a tendency to become increasingly transparent over time, and the last thing an artist wants for a carefully planned and painstakingly executed painting is for a nice set of grid lines to mysteriously appear in it after several years. For this same reason, I sketched the composition onto the canvas with white colored pencil, which seemed the least likely to ever make an unexpected appearance down the road. I have seen original paintings by Bouguereau, one of my personal favorite figure painters, in which the sketch for the composition has become easily visible over the lifetime of the piece, sometimes even revealing alternate positions for arms, drapery, etc. This makes for really interesting viewing for anyone curious about the methods of as competent a craftsman as Bouguereau, but I guarantee he (Bouguereau) never intended for it to happen.
Once I had the canvas sketched, I began working on the sky. The idea was to set the scene at sunrise, symbolizing a beginning. I spent a fairly long day blocking in the sky in the image below. I was referring to a set of photos I took in St. George, UT a few years earlier, and thought the colors and angles would create a real dramatic backdrop for the painting.
The next morning, I walked into my studio and realized the sky was far too busy. There would be so much going on with the cliffs, water, and house, that it would be overkill. Besides, who needs all the negative press associated with one of their paintings causing a series of seizures in unsuspecting viewers? Not me. I spent the next two days re-painting the sky. This is how it finally turned out. Did I mention these images were dark and grainy? When you see the photos of the finished painting, you will see what I mean. Oh, yeah…did I also mention that I had a sizable number of images vanish into the ether of a computer meltdown? Consequently, the water is also finished in this second image.
