Quent Cordair Fine Art

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).

I find that if I take my bike to the studio before my hair is completely dry from showering, I arrive looking somewhat like Carrot Top after an accident with a faulty wall socket. Maybe I just need to pay more frequent visits to my hair stylist, but for now I’ve re-discovered the hairdryer I keep as part of my water coloring supplies at home, and have arrived at work with a minimum of resemblance to Beetlejuice, Robert Smith, or any other member of the Mozart Hair Club. So I’m in a good mood and ready to start swinging at the drapery in the painting.

I intended the blue of the drapery to be more brilliant and prominent than any of the blues in the background. So I’ll be using cobalt blue–a fairly true blue, as opposed to ultramarine, which is a purple blue, etc.–as the basis of the fabric. I lay in the lines of the darkest areas first, then brush in the mid-tones and follow with the highlights. To finish, I use a little black for the darkest darks, and a white for the highest highlights. I want a satiny finish, which is why I use white–titanium, actually. If I wanted the fabric to be less satiny, I’d make sure the highlights were more toned down.

Why blue? Well, as it turns out, back in the 1980’s physicists discovered that the microscopic crystals of true blue pigments–not greenish blue or purplish blue, remember–cause a resonance in the cones of a viewer’s eye that is translated to the brain as a mild sense of euphoria when they’re placed adjacent on the canvas to very bright examples of either of the other two primary colors. Actually, I’m only kidding. But if it turns out that I’m right, I want the Nobel prize. And a cheeseburger. Right now. Seriously, though, having a dominant blue composition will accentuate the subdued reddish and orangish colors in the wings (think complimentary colors). And I myself am also particular to bright colors. Who knows, maybe my ancestors were trout.

I also take the time to complete the fastening straps on our lad’s arm. These straps are an indication that his wings are attached and not actually sprouting from his back. Unfortunately the leather cord attached to his straps is somewhat hard to see in the photo above, but I’m contemplating adding yet another before the painting is done. But I want to see the rest of the drapery completed before I make that leap.

I realize that the straps may seem odd at first, but once again, I don’t want casual viewers mistaking my flying Greek youngster for a Christian-style angel. This is their real purpose. And I didn’t want to go to the length of putting full leather harness gear on him, lest he begin to look like Edward Scissorhand’s more manually-enabled Mediterranean cousin. I think that a viewer who is aware of the title of the painting will have little trouble surmounting the logical molehill of what these leather straps on his arms could be. If not, I may need to lower the bar and just begin to put more monster trucks in my paintings.

Well, there’s not a whole lot off-hand to add to what I’ve already said while I finish up the rest of the figure’s flesh, so let’s see what tidbits I can pull out of my Felix bag of painter’s knowledge to make Step 18 slightly longer than the average fortune cookie prophecy.

Well, for starters, it’s easier to paint smaller portions of flesh, as you can imagine, so the exposed parts of the body that remain to be painted from Step 17 are all pretty simple work. While working on the flesh for a single figure, it’s important to use the same colors for each area. If you mix colors to paint one area, then try to remix them all from scratch each time you start a new area, the result can be a figure with the aspect of, say, the tanning salon equivalent to Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, as one arm or hand may be a slightly different color than the next.

When flesh painting work spans 2 or more days, I keep my palette in a mini-fridge to help keep the paint from drying. I will sometimes have to remix colors if they’ve begun to dry, or if I’m running short on them. I’ll always keep a small amount of each color in reserve before using it all up so I can refer to it for exact color matching if I need to remix it. This is a lot more accurate than the alternative method of blindly guessing, as you might expect.

The left hand of Icarus I’ve outlined in a dark color after painting it, which makes it look a little bit funny at this stage. This is because it overlaps the drapery he’s wearing. By outlining the hand, I’m giving myself a small margin where I can paint up to the hand while working on the drapery, without actually painting over any of the work I’ve already done. It’s basically a trick for creating an even, blended-looking transition between the drapery and the hand.

As I said before, it’s important to get all your flesh painting done with the same colors. And although my usual method is to paint from far to near (which means painting flesh before painting the clothes that adorn it), there are times such as this when a bit of flesh overlaps the clothes and forces me to break from my far-to-near strategy. This is because if I waited until after the drapery was painted to go back and do the hand, all my flesh colors would have dried and I’d have created an annoying amount of additional work for myself to remix my flesh palette. And I find that “annoying” and “additional work” seldom describe things that appeal to me.

Why paint far to near? With the way that I (and many other realists) apply paint, things look much more natural if the paint of closer objects overlaps the paint of distant ones. So without the outline around the hand, which I’ll eventually be painting over, there would end up being a hard line between the hand and the drapery, which–you’ll have to take my word for it–would be visually very out of step with the rest of the painting. Consistency, as the smoothie makers of the world will confirm, is a beautiful thing. A sure sign of an amateur realist is inability to regulate the borders of a painting’s various elements. Another sure sign is if exhibitions of their work tend to take place on the doors of their home refrigerators, but that’s just me rambling on without coffee. I apologize.