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:

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.

Well folks, that’s pretty much how you paint Icarus, in 21 easy steps. Like baking a cake, really, only with far less call for shortening, eggs, or a small child to blow out candles.

I suppose this is not a real step so much as a fond adieu. It may interest those of you who are still around for the ending credits to know that during the course of this painting I navigated silently through 2 bouts of bronchitis (totaling one month of feeling like a half-fish creature who breathes mud), a move into a new house (Ted Bundy’s former residence, no less–I had no idea–how droll), my car being broken into by cowardly thieves in the night who made off with half my favorite Cds, and, among other things, a battle with deadly black mold. So there you have it. Being an artist isn’t always Popsickles and candy corn, but it’s usually pretty nice.

So with that, I’d like to say thank you for having me. It has been a pleasure. I hope you’ve enjoyed the painting, and that each and every one of you are able to avoid deadly black mold in your own lives.

And Katsumi, if you’re reading this in Matsuyama, hello and happy summer!

Cheers all. Now go and get some sun.

The last few parts of the painting are now wrapped up with relative ease. The last of the toga falls into place nicely, flowing down and dropping back into shadow as we get further away from the direct rays of the sun. Visually now, the painting looks complete.

I also decide to add another strap to his arm brace–this one falls down and behind him and is intended as an attachment to the wing tip for when he needs to draw the wings to their full span. I’ve also gone back in and added some glazes to his flesh, although that sort of thing isn’t noticeable on digital reproductions, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. These glazes are mainly to balance out some of the darks and lights in the skin tones to create more consistency between all the painting’s elements now that the rest of the painting has been fully set in place.

And finally, as a clap of thunder rolling over the oily landscape of our new work, I add my signature in the lower right corner. I always sign my works with a Classical lyre on its side, which conveniently takes on the shape of a letter “D”. This is appropriate, as both my first and last names begin with the letter, but also because it’s a symbolic tie-in with the Classical nature of many of my subjects. The lyre is also a symbol of the Greek god Apollo, who is the patron god of music (which I personally translate to “art in general”), the god of light, of intellectual pursuits, and the god of truth who “cannot speak a lie”, among other things. These are all characteristics I find very appealing, and my signature references them all.

Below my name I also like to include a little triangle with 3 small balls. This is a simplified version of my family coat of arms, which in actuality has 3 fleur-de-lit in the same arrangement. I have, however, found fleur-de-lit incredibly difficult to reproduce on such a tiny scale, so I’ve opted for the simpler blob-of-paint-with-a-highlight instead.

Time for the snap. WHAM! Were you ready for that?

Ah yes, nothing like an intense, bright color to round out a chilly blue composition. Put some fire in its belly; you know what I mean? Well, excellent. This is my favorite part of working on the painting–anticipating the effect that swath of brilliant yellow will have on the composition, and then seeing it materialize exactly how I planned. So I now have a solid bass drum to put the thump under the high hat of my jazzy blues. Let’s talk about yellow, shall we?

The actual fabric I used to model the yellow sash was more of an orangey yellow. Now cadmium yellow is an orangey yellow, but the original fabric was a bit too orangey and didn’t have quite enough zim in its zam for the effect I wanted. The yellow area is small compared with the amount of blue space in the painting, so I knew I was looking for a real firecracker–the Mighty Mouse of yellows. Now my advice to you in this situation is to go back to the fabric store and find exactly the color of yellow sash you need. That’s what a responsible person would do. On the other hand, if you find yourself working on a painting step by step in front of a large audience, feel free to take the riskier route of higher potential humiliation, forget about the fabric store, and dive right in with wild abandon.

Opting for the latter route, I have to mix alternate colors and use my modeling fabric only as a suggestion of shape and form (which translates to: “additional work, more chance of messing up”). To get a real brilliant yellow, I use pure cadmium yellow right out of the tube for my mid-tones, and make the shadows fairly orange in color to create a nice simmering foundation for those highlights. Cold shadows would dampen the effect, and with warm orange shadows we’re guaranteed that the blue toga will have its complimentary color living right next door, reaching over the fence and picking from its prize cherry tree, stirring up their old rivalry. Exactly what we want. Friendly neighbors make for boring paintings (although they’re often good for barbeques).