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New Year’s Eve: Step 7

New Year's Eve

The glaze technique worked like a charm for the fireworks and the city lights. I coated the entire window area with a very thin layer of linseed oil mixed with a little burnt umber and ivory black. Both pigments are relatively transparent and serve mainly to lend their quick-drying properties to the glaze. The bright colors of the fireworks and lights were mixed with titanium white, which is quite opaque and powerful pigments such as cadmium red and cerulean blue easily overpower weaker pigments like the burnt umber. The glaze allowed me to blend the colors easily onto the surface of the under-painting, and control the effect of the light and smoke. I was so pleased with the result that I decided to try a similar technique to paint the detail in the hair of both figures.

Again, this image is a bit over-exposed, and there is a lot of extra light being reflected by the wet glaze.

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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."