Quent Cordair Fine Art

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.

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.