Quent Cordair Fine Art

In a lot of ways, I’m taking the same approach to painting this bridge as I do with painting a figure painting. I now have the background and foreground of the painting completely blocked in, sans detail, but the bridge itself remains untouched. This is often the same approach I would use if the bridge was actually a figure. In this step, you can see one reason why it’s useful to wait until the background has been properly dealt with before going ahead and painting in the main items of focus, such as the bridge or a figure as the case may be.

While the paint is still wet, I use a dry fan brush to gently blend the entire background. This takes the harsh edge off of the loose brush strokes that were used to quickly put the colors in place. While doing this, I continually clean and dry my brush (I actually use several brushes for this) to keep it dry and free of paint. Blending with a wet brush is about as effective as performing surgery with a garden hoe–You can be as careful as you like, but you’ll more than likely end up with a disappointing mess.

I’ve included before and after images to illustrate how dramatic the blend actually is. By comparing the accompanying image to the previous step, you can see how the image has become much softer and is gentle on the eyes. You can also see how the blending has bled over the borders of the bridge. This is a big reason why I haven’t bothered to block in the bridge yet. By waiting until after this stage, I’m saving myself the trouble of having to either paint the bridge twice, or complicate my blending by trying to carefully mind its edges.

This soft background is an important part of my personal landscape technique. If my painting was a Big Mac, this would essentially be my secret sauce. The painting may seem hazy right now, but this is the perfect backdrop for adding details. And by adding just a few details to the gentle fade, I’m able to retain the soft sense of the painting while simultaneously creating as high a level of realism as I like. And another useful part of this technique is that even when the faded background has dried completely, it’s very easy to paint consecutive layers on top of it that appear seamlessly blended, even though a wet-into-wet blend is impossible. It’s effectively a trick for achieving wet-on-wet blending results from a completely dry layer, which allows me a lot of freedom throughout the rest of the painting process.

Satisfied with the color scheme and general layout of the clouds in the background, it’s time to work out the same kind of fixed color scheme for the water, which is the only other area of the painting that really needs its color scheme fixed before I can start on the bridge.

The colors of the water, of course, are directly based on those of the sky, which is why it’s important to be satisfied with the sky colors before moving on to this stage. If you look carefully at the colors I have in the water here, you’ll notice that they are actually opposite what would ordinarily appear in nature. Naturally, the warm reddish color at the base of the horizon would appear reflected on the most distant (topmost) part of the water, and the rest of the water would be filled with cloud color. But I really like the way the red interacts with the dark burnt umber below it.

It creates a warm transition on the horizon that I decide to duplicate in the transition between the water and foreground area. So by placing the red at the bottom of the water area, I’m committing an intentional and rather blatant violation of the laws of physics for the sake of satisfying my personal aesthetic desires. And, well, that’s the kind of liberty an artist can take, and one I personally believe an artist should take when necessary.

Those who insist on strict adherence to nature should, in my opinion, invest in a nice camera.

I also decide not to reproduce the cloud colors in the water exactly as they appear in the sky. To create a more exaggerated sense of “water color”, I’ve decided to make the reflected cloud colors slightly greener than they appear in the sky. This also helps to make the reflection a bit more pronounced, as I think will be apparent later on. By changing the colors in the water just slightly from the those in the sky, I’m providing a subtle visual reminder that we’re looking at separate areas, and that the colors in the water are a reflection. This isn’t something that a viewer will likely notice consciously, but it will contribute to the overall effect of the painting very subtly and is something I have to think about at this stage.

Finally, I go ahead and block in the foreground area in burnt umber so I can create the same subtle blending of the border with the water that I created with the sky and horizon in step 4. The areas that I’ve blocked in with burnt umber are going to remain dark areas of the painting, and the umber itself is actually an approximation of their final value. As you can see, I intend for them to remain quite dark in contrast to the sky and water. As with the step before, all my paint application at this point is very loose.

I’ll worry about the details later. For now, the important thing is to get the colors right.

After the basic composition has been brushed onto the canvas, it’s time to begin painting. Before I do that, however, I have to consider the colors I need. I usually approach a painting by thinking in terms of distance, from far to near. It’s usually easier to paint the furthest elements and then move forward. This isn’t by any means a rule set in stone, since some effects look much better when painted differently, but in general it’s a guideline I like to follow. So my first consideration is the sky.

I want the setting of the scene to be after sunset. This will allow me to use a lot of rich, warm colors, which goes with the mood I’d like to evoke. I’m already planning on making the foreground and bridge itself very dark to provide good contrast to the eventual lights I’ll be adding to the background city and bridge. This means I can’t make the sky too dark, otherwise the whole painting might turn out looking rather grim, which isn’t at all the effect I’m aiming for. My solution is to make the top half of the sky a regular, bright blue, as if I were painting a scene set in midday. The horizon, then, will be where I place the subdued, evening sunset colors. But because blue and orange are complimentary colors, I know that if I just created an even fade between the top and bottom of the sky, I’d end up with a dull gray area in the middle. I don’t want that to happen, so I need to break up the transition area by adding some clouds that will be much more pleasing than a dirty gray fade.

I apply the colors loosely, mixing them first on my palette. I’m not trying to be too precise at this time, I’m only interested in getting the right colors into the right places to satisfy my idea of how the sky should look. It’s easy at this point to make drastic changes, if necessary, although I seldom do. It may not look like I’m being very accurate at this point, but that’s not exactly true. My accuracy at this stage isn’t accuracy of minor details, but rather accuracy of color. I’ll worry about refining the details of the composition later. At this point, the most important thing is to be certain the background colors are exactly the way I want them. The main reason for this is that the colors I choose now will have a big impact on the rest of the painting. They dictate the mood of the picture and the color palette I’ll use for every other part of the painting. If I don’t get them quite right, it could cause problems down the road.

After I chop in the sky, I use a little burnt umber to fill in the horizon area that overlaps the sky. The reason for this is ease of blending. It’s much easier to blend two regions when both are wet. If I wait for the sky to dry completely before painting in the horizon, I won’t be able to blend the two together and the result will be a harsh hard line separating them, or a muddled forced-looking blend that won’t appear at all natural. Since the horizon and sky are in the far distance, it’s important to have a good, soft blend to create the illusion of atmosphere. The blend I use isn’t dramatic. All I really do is take the harsh edge off of the division line by hitting it with a small soft brush. It doesn’t seem like much, but the overall effect it creates is very important to my technique.

I’ve chosen not to include a detailed description of the process of preparing a canvas in this discussion, mainly because I know Bryan Larsen has discussed it here in part in the past, and because I have already written a detailed article on the matter myself, which is readily available. It will suffice to say that the canvas used for this painting was prepared by myself in my studio using traditional, archival techniques and materials, and was allowed to season for about 8 months.

With the composition now worked out and with the reference material I need safely (and legally) in hand, my next step is to lay a guide drawing onto the canvas.

It’s probably worth mentioning that with a lot of my paintings, a great deal of the overall work is actually sunk into the concept design, composition development, and search for and procurement of appropriate models and resources. Once I’m to the point of actually being able to sit down at the easel and just paint the painting, often times the majority of the real work is already done. This painting is a fair example of that. It took me three weeks to get to the point of execution, and only about 3 days of actual painting time to complete it. With figure paintings, the development of the concept itself can take months, depending on the nature of the theme and subject. By the time the paintbrush first hits the canvas, it’s often pretty easy sailing from there.

My favorite method of working my design onto a primed canvas is to make an inky mixture of gum spirits of turpentine and burnt umber. This mixture dries extremely quickly–almost as fast as acrylic–and can be quickly and easily wiped back off the canvas if any changes need to be made. It also dries very lean (low in oil content), which accords well to the rich-on-lean golden rule of archival oil painting. With this method, I can quickly hash out my design and be ready to paint in short order.

The result is a fairly loose line drawing that gives me an indication of where things will be in the painting, allows me to get straight the lines that need to be straight, and also allows me the freedom to tweak the composition as needs be if I’m unsatisfied with the way it looks on the actual canvas. I don’t bother with any shading, textures, details, or intimate parts of the composition at this stage. All those are still in my head and I know where they’re going to be. But at this point, I’m only concerned with creating the basic framework of the painting that will aid me in the first applications of paint.

Having searched around my local area, and not in the mood for a bridge-seeking road trip, I was still unsatisfied with the references I’d found. So, as any good child of the information age would do, I hit the web to see if I could find visual materials that could be used to transform the references I’d already procured locally into what I had in mind for the final composition. Usually what I’m looking for in this kind of situation is a combination of images, each of which might provide one small piece that could be integrated into my unique final idea. I might like the cloud lighting I find here, a good idea for water coloring there, and an interesting pattern of city lights somewhere else. Then, after redrawing the basic not-quite-perfect bridge I had already found myself, I use these small references to flesh out the complete composition exactly the way I like.

This time, however, I happened across an image that immediately struck me as being a good approximation of what I already had in mind. The bridge was good and the colors were good, but the sky was bad, there was the matter of a boat getting in the way, and the distant shore was missing everything I needed. In general though I liked it a lot. The problem I then faced was the obvious one: how close to the original photograph does my painting need to be before I have to start worrying about copyright violations? I hadn’t been in this situation before, so I decided to find out.

More surfing the web revealed some very convoluted guidelines about fair use laws, none of which gave me any certainty about my project. In an effort to nip the problem in the bud, I decided it might be easier to just track down the original photographer, get his permission, and not worry about whether or not I officially needed it. I eventually found an email address for him and fired off a message. A day passes, and I find my message returned with a failed delivery result. So I send another, this time to the webmaster of the website that was posting his photo. A few more days pass with no reply. I try again. Same result.

Okay, that didn’t work, so now it’s back to looking at fair use laws. I make a call to an art business consultant in San Francisco and things get a little more clear: using an image for non-profit gives you a lot of leeway in fair use, but using it for profit is a different story. And as I intended to sell my painting and eventually use the proceeds to treat myself to, oh I don‘t know, a shiny new toaster perhaps, I certainly fell into the latter category. The actual percentage, say, of the original image you use isn’t really the issue. If your new image bears a reasonable resemblance to the old one, then a good case could be made against you. And although it wouldn’t be profitable for anyone to take me to court over a small painting, I naturally decided to be a well-mannered capitalist and get the photographer’s permission, or give it up entirely.

So I set the hounds on our unsuspecting friend, Mr. Photographer to see if I could flush him out. I turned the matter over to a good friend of mine, who soon tracked down the lad’s father and had him on the telephone within a couple days. From there he was able to call the photographer himself, but received no reply to his phone message. Another call, and still no result. Back to calling papa, this time receiving a new email address which proves to be… the taciturn webmaster for the exact same site I had emailed at the beginning of this whole affair. So, two shakes away from calling in Scooby Doo and the gang to solve this mystery, we finally get an email response from our man, who is most likely just sick of being pestered so much. We write back, a long delay, a response, repeat, and finally, after about 3 weeks of diplomatic dodge ball, my friend works out an agreement to the sum of 50 bucks.

The good news is that the runway is now clear, artistic property rights are safer than ever, I can finally get to work, and a poor man in Tennessee is finally at peace and able to sleep at night.