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« New Year’s Eve: Step 2
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New Year’s Eve: Step 3

New Year's Eve

Before proceeding, I should mention that many of the images of this piece, like this one, will show a lot of reflected light off of the brush strokes. I will be using a lot of dark colors and thicker paint than usual. Also, the fireworks and city lights as well as some of the figure details will be painted into an oil glaze that will be highly reflective. This all adds to the difficulty of getting good pictures of the painting. Keep that in mind as you read the posts, and hopefully when the piece is finished and dry I will be able to get some better photos.

The first issue I needed to address was the overall lighting scheme for the composition. I don’t really have any reference material for the background other than half a dozen photos of various firework displays and nighttime city skylines I found online. What ends up in the painting will have to be created based loosely on those images. The scrap I shot of the models was taken in brighter light than will appear in the finished piece since cameras have trouble with detail and color in dim light. So the lighting on the figures will require a little creative tweaking of its own. I decided to begin by roughly chopping in the background colors. This should give me an idea of how to adjust the figures so that they fit in to the painting.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 22nd, 2006 at 1:24 pm and is filed under New Year's Eve. 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.

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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."