Skip to content • Skip to gallery information

Quent Cordair Fine Art

Click to chat with
a gallery representative

Like us on Facebook

« First Heat: Step 1
First Heat: Step 3 »

First Heat: Step 2

First Heat

For those of you who have been regular visitors to the Artist’s Studio, I will be taking a slightly different approach with this painting. In the past I have generally waited until a noticeable amount of work has been done to the piece before I posted a summary and explanation to the Studio. I thought it might be more interesting to post more often, regardless of visual changes to the piece, to discuss the smaller steps involved with the composition and my thoughts on the piece as it progresses. This will mean new posts roughly every other day, though possibly shorter, and occasionally without accompanying images. Hopefully this proves to be interesting to read, and perhaps it will encourage more questions and comments on the development of the piece.

Now that I am beginning to get a feel for the arrangement of the piece I can begin to nail down some of the details, beginning with the figure. The reference material I took with the model is great for the basic pose and the body of the figure. However, the model is much younger than the subject of the painting is supposed to be, and isn’t quite as clean cut either. It isn’t always possible to find all of the characteristics you need for a particular subject in one model, although occasionally you do get lucky. In this case I will be using some additional reference material to change the style and color of the hair, and to age the figure. This sketch represents the composite figure that will, for the most part, appear in the final painting. Some additional work will be needed to get the lighting and the coloring just right for the steel mill environment.

Tags: ,

This entry was posted on Monday, January 10th, 2005 at 10:11 am and is filed under First Heat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a Reply

About Bryan Larsen ~

Bryan Larsen

"I was born on February 12, 1975, and have been drawing as long as I can remember. By the time I was in high school, I knew I wanted to be an artist, although at the time I didn't have a clear idea of how exactly I would use my talents to make a living.

"As I continued studying art, I began to suspect that fine visual art was dead. No one seemed interested in teaching students how to draw well, or paint well. More often than not, my own skills exceeded those of my instructors.

"The only field left that seemed to require good drawing, painting, and compositional skills was illustration, and therefore I began studying illustration at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. I became even more convinced that I had made the right decision in staying away from fine art as I endured course after course of required "drawing" and "painting" classes in which instructors required me to draw with "less focus", or use ridiculous materials such as shellac, glue, sand, salt, etc.

"My second year at Utah State, I met Damon Denys. In discussing Art with him I realized that there were other people who believed that technique and subject matter were indispensable components of any work of art. I then decided that I would work to develop my own painting skills with the purpose of creating artwork that I considered worthy of being called Fine Art.

"Since that time, I have studied on my own: Drawing from live models to learn the human form, studying proper painting techniques from any source I could find ample reason to trust, and developing a philosophy of Art based on reason, and life on earth.

"My goal is to portray the heroic and romantic in human nature and human achievement in a realistic style and a modern setting. I place particular emphasis on composition, technique, realistic detail, proper craftsmanship and consistency of style."