Quent Cordair Fine Art

So here we go, continuing on with the fleshy parts of the figure. I already had to start on the neck, as I explained in the last step, in order to finish the face without our fine gentleman looking as though he were the guest of honor at a prosthetic beard convention. The hair was chopped in, but unfinished as well.

Since it was necessary to begin work on the neck, it makes sense to continue with and finish the neck. And since the “neck bone’s connected to the.(everyone feel free to sing along) chest bone”, I decide to polish off the torso as my next order of business–and I really do mean that in the least Jeffrey Dahmer-esque way possible.

SHAZAM! Ok, the torso is now done. But I’d like to mention a couple of things on the topics of white skin and body hair before we continue:

First of all, yes, I do realize it’s a bit inconsistent to have a pearly-skinned youth running around in classical Greece. And no, I’m not implying that Icarus just got off the Greyhound longboat express from Scandinavia before his famous flight. However, since bronze skin is commonly associated with manliness, and by association experience, wisdom, etc., I’m opting for a fair-skinned Icarus to give him an element of youthful innocence to counter the already manly element of the beard. That is not to say that his overall demeanor is going to come off as “youthful” or “innocent” in the end, but it will go a long way to take that romance-novel-cover-model edge off of him, which sounds like peaches to me.

Second, it is perhaps worth mentioning that, although body hair is a natural phenomenon, it doesn’t translate so well to paint. In fact, it can look downright weird if you truthfully represent your model’s chest or armpits in all their Sasquatchian splendor. It is for this reason that I’ve chosen to set my brush to the epilator setting while completing the figure’s torso.

The hair is finished off with relative ease, once the general flow and form has already been established, as it was in the last step. Painting black hair is actually very simple. You only need two colors for black hair: pure black, and a lighter color, which can be any number of hues depending on what kind of highlights you want. That’s pretty much it. So once the general flow of the hair is established with the initial chop, all that’s left is to put in the highlights, do some blending, and then go back and dress the whole mop up by adding a few loose hairs here and there with a fine liner brush.

With the wings now wrapped up, I can finally get down to the figure himself. When I start work on the central figure in a painting, there’s usually a sense of anxiety that creeps up in me. I liken it to reaching the top of the first big hill of a roller coaster. That moment where the car stops and you’re staring down at a huge drop and thinking, “well, there’s no turning back now”; it’s sort of like that, only not quite as intense. It’s definitely exciting.

Well, here we are then, at the top of the roller coaster, just about to take the plunge. Better hang on and, please, keep your hands inside the car at all times. This is for your own safety as well as mine. I won’t assume responsibility for any lost limbs as we enter the final stretch of the painting’s progress.

I like to start with my figure’s head. It’s the most important part of a figure, as well as the easiest to screw up. And I’m a fan of lopping off the difficult areas of a painting as early as possible so the rest of the painting knows who’s boss and doesn’t cop a tough guy attitude with me. I’ve included 3 shots of the head in progress.

In the first of the three progress shots, I start with a palette of only 4 colors and begin to lay in the boundaries of the different areas of the face and beard. To indicate the eyebrow and beard, I use a tone that’s lighter than they will eventually be. It’s a lot easier to make changes to light-colored paint than it is to really dark or black paint. So I map out what will eventually be the darkest areas with a mid-tone color for now. When I know I’ve got them just where I want them, I’ll then go ahead and darken them appropriately, as you can see in the third progress shot.

In the second progress shot, I’m still working with mid-tones, but I’ve added a couple more colors to my flesh palette to begin adding depth and complexity to the skin. Once I’m confident that all the details of the face have been laid in and look like they’re in the right places, I go ahead and add the darkest darks, the lightest lights, and other subtle hues that need to be mixed separately, like the pinkish lip color, the burnt red where the nostril meets the cheek, etc. etc.

I also have to work on part of the neck at this stage. In order for the beard to look natural, it has to be blended with the adjacent flesh areas while the paint is still wet. So I have no choice but to lay in the neck at this point. I’m careful not to make the beard too clean cut, because that would feel too contemporary to me and I don’t want my figure to look like a Hollywood actor playing the role of a Greek hero. I also need to blend the flesh with the hairline while the paint is still wet–I don’t want him to look like he’s wearing a bad toupee–so I go ahead and chop in the basic flow of the hair too.

Having massaged out the two biggest technical lumps in our wings in step 14, finishing them up is going to be a snap. All that’s really left is a lot of scribbling and bibbling with a limited number of grayish colors. I can go back to using my black and white comp drawing as a rough guide for my progress too, which makes it all the easier.

After getting all the feathers in place, I carefully brush around their edges with a stiff, dry-bristled brush to diffuse and break up the hard lines of their borders. This kicks them up a couple of notches on the meter-of-fuziness, which places them, I imagine, somewhere between a kitten and a frayed oven mitt–not a bad place for a feather to be. I also add a slight amount of the orangey color on the rightmost outside edge of the wing to hint at the topside feathers that are out of view.

Last, but not least, I need to do a bit more modeling of the wing before I’ll be 100% content with the foreshortening. For this, I’m not going to actually slap on any thick paint over what I’ve already laid in. Rather, I’m going to create a glaze from the darker color I used on the lower part of the wing. To this pure color, I add some linseed oil–about one third as much as the amount of paint to which I’m adding it.

I then glaze over part of the orangey feathers to give them a more pronounced sense of fading back into the dark area just above his arm, as well as some of the feathers in the area above. All I’m really doing is darkening some of the feathers to make them seem further away. The result is a much more gradual and delicate modeling of the wing, making the topmost ridge of the wing seem a little bit closer to us than everything else.

With that, I think we can call the wings effectively finished, although it must be said that nothing is truly finished until the entire painting has been brought up to this same level of completion to be judged as a whole. Until that happens, anything can and might be changed or adjusted.

Straight away, I need to address the foreshortening problem with the wing. It’s just too flat. My first move is to add lots of new little feathers to the area that I painted in the last step. I want the feathers to get smaller and closer together as they near the “joint” where the wing would connect to our lofty gentleman’s shoulder.

To accentuate this newly modeled form for our wing, I also go ahead and darken the area just below this so-called joint and also the area between his arm and body. These areas will be in deep shadow, which will give the necessary contrast to make the upper part of the wing look closer to us. And–nothing up my sleeve–PRESTO, we have a foreshortened wing. It’s far from complete, though, so don’t develop too much of an attachment to what you see just yet.

Okay, now I can think about our second problem, which is gradually transitioning from our lovely gold-tipped feathers to their more color-challenged gray counterparts. With the newly added foreshortened adjustment, this isn’t going to be too difficult because I really only need that transition to take place on the backmost part of the wing.

All the feathers in deep shadow are already of the gray variety, and all I need to do is add a few golden stepping stones of color at the point where the wing “folds” down. This area is also in shadow, and the subdued darkened value of the golden color makes it that much easier to pull off the transition. I add a few feathers of the straight gray persuasion below the transition just to see if it looks okay. I think we’re definitely going in the right direction this time, so we’ll take a short recess and reconvene in Step 15 for the heart-pounding conclusion to this visual wing drama.

As I mentioned before, while working on the wing I’m trying to create two transitions as I move from top to bottom: a transition from small to large feathers and a transition from golden-orange to grayish feathers.

As my work continues, I’m still trying to stick pretty diligently to my black and white compositional drawing. I’ve decided that I’ll try making a clean transition to gray feathers at the point where the longer feathers begin. This is based on my observations of actual bird wings and the way their color patterns make similar changes. I know, of course, that I can go back and change things if I like without too much trouble, so it’s not a big deal if my first idea doesn’t please me.

The result is what you see in the accompanying photo. It does not, as it turns out, please me. Not at all. Now I know what you’re thinking.
“Damon,” you’re saying to yourself, “you’re a professional who makes a living creating works of art. Mistakes are naught but pebbles in the playground of mere mortals, where true artists such as yourself surely never tread.” Or perhaps you’re just thinking “yup, see, I knew this guy was a hack”. Either way, here is all the evidence you need to reinforce the fact that not everything always goes according to plan, and that, indeed, I eat my Spaghetti-O’s one at a time just like everyone else. (or, wait.um, never mind)

Even before I reach the color transition point I’m becoming unsatisfied with the look of things. I’m pretty confident after seeing only this much of the wing cut in that a sudden change to gray is not going to be what I want, despite the fact that real birds in nature prefer it that way. Also, I don’t think the transition from small to large feathers is coming along smoothly either. And as a matter of fact, I suspect the cream in my coffee may have been a bit off this morning as well. These are all bad signs.

Another problem I’m noticing is that the wing appears to be too flat. Since the wing is folded up, there should be an obvious foreshortening where it connects to the figure’s shoulder, and the majority of the wing should appear to be further away.

So, ultimately, I decide that a gradual transition in color is the best approach–nature and its winged denizens be damned. And I decide to go back to my early preparatory sketch (the line drawing in pencil) as my main source of reference for the foreshortened shape of the wing and to dispense with the full comp drawing (in black and white) as my formal guide. This will mean backtracking a bit (translation: painting over everything I just did today) to attack this can of beans from a new angle. And remind me to buy some fresh coffee cream for tomorrow as well.