Quent Cordair Fine Art

With the bridge and background in place, the only unfinished part of the painting left is the foreground. So why don’t we start by firing in a happy little tree? (just kidding) Actually, I don’t intend to change much here. What I’m really after is to essentially keep the foreground the way it is, and add just enough detail to it to make it seem “finished”. Compositionally, it would work just fine to leave it the way it is. But then, you can’t go sending paintings with huge tracts of unfinished canvas to galleries–not reputable ones, anyway. And if you’ll recall our original theme, and the title of the painting, “Two Shores”, then you’ll realize that although the painting would be compositionally square by leaving the foreground a blank of burnt umber, it would not be thematically complete without some suggestion of untrammeled grass, trees, or wilderness. Otherwise, we’d have to rename it something like “One Shore”, and that would require a very silly bridge, wouldn’t it?

Painting light color onto a dark base to suggest detail, without getting carried away with REAL detail, is one of the easiest things to do in a painting like this. I don’t have to bend over backwards to paint a lot of detailed bushes and trees, for example, because if I just suggest that kind of detail, your eye will do the rest of the work for me (and I can spend more time enjoying my coffee this morning, thank you very much). In fact, I actually don’t want a lot of detail flying around down there, because if that happened it might distract from the elements of the painting that you really SHOULD be noticing. So I’m going for a bare minimum here. I do this with a little green on the far left, combined with some darker color under the bridge (in its shadow), where I show some bushes overlapping the water.

That’s enough. And I’ll finish up by tidying the base of the little island with some of the same color I used in the foreground. This is a handy way of unifying those two areas without getting too weird.

Of course, a painting would never be quite complete without the requisite signature. I tend to subscribe to the classical method of placing the signature where it won’t distract too much from the painting (and thus, as the logic goes, confuse the overall composition). And there you have it, “Two Shores”.

As a final note I’d like to add that an important step in this process is actually not being shown. (I could, of course, show you, but please take my word–it’s not very interesting) After completing a painting, I always set aside specific time to carefully clean my palette–that’s the flat thing with the thumb-hole in it that painters use to carry and mix their colors (hey, some people might not already know that). I work with more than one palette, but I always tie up the final work with my “finishing palette”. This is a small, durable, plexiglass palette that’s actually perfect for doing detail work, final skin tones, glazing, etc. Every one of my paintings you see at the Cordair gallery was completed using this palette. I’m very particular about it, and I never let anyone else touch it. In fact (prepare to roll your eyes), it even has its own special drawer in my painting stand. As one of my favorite chefs once said, “these things are sacred to us”. He was actually talking about a cutting board, but I think his sentiment is just as applicable to my own tools of the trade. I’m an artist, yes, but I’m also a craftsman. And as such, I attach a lot of importance to those things that bring my creations into being. Painting is a very hands-on process, and every time I send a finished painting away, a little piece of me gets sent away with it. Call me a hopeless romantic, but just don’t let me catch you licking my palette next time you visit my studio–that would probably be punishment enough in itself, but I’d still chase you out the door with the nearest heavy object.

I hope you’ve enjoyed following the process of my little bridge painting. It’s been enjoyable documenting it for you . Cheers, and adieu.

Well, the day of reckoning has finally come, and it’s time to put this bridge in place. As I mentioned before, I’m going to have to keep things pretty dark over here to prevent those distant lights from losing their luster. The result of this will be a sort of inverted distance emphasis that’s pretty atypical (at least for me) in paintings. What on earth do I mean by “inverted distance emphasis”? No, I’m not trying to impress you with fancy terminology I learned in art school. To be honest, most people in art schools would be lucky if their vocabulary rivaled that of a certain leader of a certain country whose name I won’t mention because I’d like to avoid bags of potential hate mail. What I mean by “inverted distance emphasis” (actually, that does sound pretty grand–I’m not pretentious, I swear) is that usually the elements of a painting that are closest to you are the ones that are intended to receive the most attention. The background elements, in that case, are often used as a compositional means of forcing or leading your eye to those important foreground areas. So when I say “inverted”, I’m talking about the opposite, where–as in this current painting–the items of real importance are actually located in the background, and all that wonderful foreground space is actually just there pointing you in the right direction (has anyone noticed yet that the bridge is essentially a huge arrow saying “HEY! Look at the skyline”? This is what we call a blatantly obvious compositional tool. You have to be careful with these kinds of things, lest people begin to think you received your compositional schooling in a Hollywood film studio)

Finishing the bridge is actually pretty easy work, and there’s not a whole lot to say about it. It’s really a simple matter of filling in the interior with burnt umber, and then carefully adding some subtle metallic accents with a bit of gray to indicate where the fading light is catching the side beams and supports. After that, I get to add more lights (yay!) to indicate the flow of traffic–the closest light is, remember, a red tail light to subtly indicate that we are both physically and metaphorically moving TOWARDS the distant shore. And in fact, lights are so fun, let’s go ahead and add some cute little pairs of them all along the edge of the bridge. Don’t tell me engineers don’t think the same thing when they design bridges themselves. Seriously though, these are a good way of reinforcing the curve of the bridge, which–if you’ll recall my earlier Hollywood comment–is actually a compositional tool leading you toward the distant shore. Excellent.

Now things start to get fun. I love painting lights. The day I get to add lights to my buildings and bridges is like the day your secret decoder ring finally comes in the mail. With the burnt umber base completely dry at this point, I can apply the colors for the lights without worrying about the dark base color dirtying them. I use titanium, cadmium red, cad yellow, and a combination of cerulean and ultramarine blue to create a variety of lights.

To create a nice, soft “melting” effect for my lights, I first mix a very thin (lots of linseed oil), inky mixture of each color, which is very transparent. I use this to create a hazy areola beneath some of the lights, and then go back with the thicker paint and add a fleck of opaque light color to the center. I then very carefully blend this slightly into the hazy area to make the lights bleed nicely. I also add some direct flecks of light without the hazy under-paint, just for variety and to accentuate the sense of distant atmosphere.

I should mention here that I’m thinning the colors of my lights with linseed oil instead of turpentine at this stage. You might remember that earlier, when I was sketching the painting design onto the canvas, I added turpentine to my umber instead of linseed oil to achieve the same inky effect. The reason I’m switching to oil is to obey the rich-on-lean rule. Oil dries more slowly than turpentine, so by using oil at this stage to thin my paint, I’m painting a slower-drying layer on top of a faster-drying layer and ensuring that the future owner of this painting doesn’t curse my name as he writes ghastly checks to conservation laboratories.

So why am I essentially icing the cake while leaving the interior of the bridge bare? Don’t the lights seem like something that should be done last?

Well, sometimes, yes. But I need to be able to see how much contrast is going to exist between the lights and their environment before I can go ahead and paint the foreground elements. At the moment, the foreground is as dark as can be. I’ll be painting over it to give it more detail, but before I do that I want to know how light or dark to make those accents so I don’t drown out my lovely little lights with a crop of over-bright grass in the foreground. And I know the side of the bridge is going to need some highlights on its curve, catching the light of the sky at an angle, so that region is also staying unpainted until I know how light or dark I need to make it. I can tell the sky itself (remember I decided to paint it brighter than it would actually appear at this time of day to give a more cheerful impression) is going to give the lights plenty of competition already, so it’s obvious that I’m going to need to keep the foreground quite dark in the final painting if I don’t want to lose them entirely into the mix of the composition.

On first inspection, you might not notice a significant change between this step and the last one. You might be saying to yourself, “Damon, here I am waiting to see where the painting is headed, and you’ve obviously been snowboarding all day.” Unfortunately, however, that isn’t true. (I generally prefer to sit in the lodge next to the fire with a bowl of 4-alarm chili, anyway)

At this point, I have to carefully paint the support cables for the suspension bridge. There’s really not a lot of room for error, and the work has to be done very carefully. Doing this on large-scale paintings is something of a nightmare, so I’m glad I chose a small canvas this time around. It’s not enough to just paint straight lines. While painting them I also have to, in the moment, make decisions to fade the lines slightly to give the impression of distance or light emersion from the sky behind. It’s easier to control those kinds of fading effects by adding a little turpentine to the umber, but that usually also creates a hard edge on the cables which makes them look too harsh and non-atmospheric. So I use a dry-brushing technique with very little color on the brush and essentially “scrub” the paint in a line. If that sounds troublesome, well, you’re not mistaken.

With the cables painted in nice and straight (whew! Deep breath), it’s time to go back to the sky and water. You’ll notice that I’ve blocked-in all the edges of the bridge, while its interior is still empty. This, of course, was in anticipation of my next concern, which is to go back and add more detail to the clouds and their reflections. With the edges of the bridge blocked in, but the bridge itself still not finished, I can work on the clouds and not worry too much about painting “out of the lines”, safe in the knowledge that I can easily touch up the bridge if I should accidentally get cloud or water color on it. With the colors of the clouds and water already set in place, it’s easy to add more detail and give them more definition.

With the entire background effectively blocked in, I can now turn my attention to the bridge itself. For this, as with the foreground and horizon, I use burnt umber. Burnt umber is a wonderful thing. It’s one of the fastest drying pigments a traditional painter has available to him, and it carries that property with it when you mix it with most other colors.

This is important when you consider the golden rule of oil painting: rich-on-lean. Rich-on-lean is a fancy way of saying “never apply a faster-drying paint on top of a slower-drying paint, or bad things will happen.” Some people–we won’t mention any names–choose to ignore important painting rules. And all I have to say is there are good reasons why the “Mona Lisa” and “Last Supper” are having troubles despite the care of the best trained and funded conservationists in the world.

By blocking in the foreground and bridge with burnt umber, I know I can come back when these areas are dry and paint on top of them without risking any DaVinci-esque blunders (oops, sorry Leo. I know I said I wouldn’t mention any names.). I want the foreground and bridge of the final painting to be very dark to play into the twilight setting and to allow the lights I plan on adding to the city and bridge to twinkle nicely without completely vanishing into an environment that’s overly bright. Pure burnt umber happens to be exactly the hue and value I want these areas to have, so I don’t need to bother mixing it with anything (hallelujah, this almost never happens). While we’re on the subject, I may as well mention that mixing colors–just sitting with my palette and knife in hand–easily makes up at least half of the actual painting process. It can be very time consuming to get the colors just right, and once I do I protect them with crazy practices like storing my palette in the fridge overnight.

I also take some of the pure umber (and some with a little titanium in it) and begin to add detail to the buildings on the skyline and the island on the right side of the painting. Because the theme of the painting is the progress of industry, and because factories are often located near the water, I choose to give the distant buildings a good industrial feel to them by adding a variety of smokestacks. This also works well with the red of the skyline above them, which adds a nice hint of the fiery goodness we know is percolating deep within those factories’ bellies. The last work that needs to be done with the umber is to start the bridge’s reflection in the water below it. As I described in the previous step, the hazy technique used to paint the water makes it very easy to blend the reflected color, even though the water is already dry.