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Icarus: Step 15

Icarus

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.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 4th, 2005 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Icarus. 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.

2 Responses to “Icarus: Step 15”

  1. Pat Says:
    June 4th, 2005 at 4:30 pm

    I have been enjoying your paintings and this wonderful work in progress. Thank you for sharing your talent and insight with the world. The Cordair gallery is my favorite place to enjoy beautiful art. I look forward to seeing the completed painting.

  2. Damon Denys Says:
    June 16th, 2005 at 9:45 am

    Thanks so much for dropping by, Pat. Your compliments truly are strawberries on my life’s bowl of corn flakes. I’m glad you’re enjoying the painting. It’s a pleasure to know that I can make mistakes in front of an international audience, or babble on about Sesame Street, and true believers will keep following my progress anyway.

    And as long as we’re here, I’d like to congratulate the US soccer team on their recent victory in the qualifying game for the World Cup. They tore it up here in Salt Lake City against Costa Rica last weekend. Go team

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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."