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« Precision: Step 9
Breaking Through: Step 1 »

Precision: Step 10

Precision

And here comes what is probably the most tedious part of the entire painting. The guitar neck. But first…

The head and tuning pegs. Why? Because, frankly, I’m not excited about jumping right into the neck and frets and strings and all those nasty little things that have to be all aligned just right and spaced just slightly further apart and turn at just a tad of an angle each time in order to accord with the slightly tilted angle in which he’s holding the instrument. No, for some reason it seems more agreeable to bite off the other end of the guitar first, like an old man easing into a nice steaming hot bath of natural spring water. At least, that’s what I tell myself. Okay, so here we go.

In painting the lower three nylon strings on the guitar, I mix a little bit of the wood color into a gray color to give them a slight sense of transparency, while I do not do this for the top three. If you’ve seen a classical guitar before, you’ll know what I’m talking about, but it’s as simple as that. High contrast elements like brass and lacquered wood (without the wood grain, that is) are probably easier to paint than some might expect. Just get a couple basic colors in the right place, add a couple clean highlights and very dark darks and *hey presto* you usually end up with something that looks pretty nice. I cannot say the same thing for wild animals. This is probably why I am not known as “Damon Denys, painter of wild animals”, and you cannot buy embellished prints of armadillos and possums at a customized personal gallery of mine in your local shopping mall. Yes, I’m sure this is the exact reason for that…

Precision

Anyhoo, on to the dreaded neck. My first task is to paint all the little islands of exposed neck wood that are bordered by the fret markers and the strings, as you can see in the second photo included. There are a lot of these showing; 92, in case you were wondering. I’m careful to keep them all as straight and in order as far as their logical adjustments of spacing and perspective demand. They are not all perfect, of course, but I want them to be as close as I can at this point to save more work. I wait for this paint to dry so that I can then glaze over it with semi-opaque colors that are slightly adjusted from the original. This is to show the mild reflective quality of the wood on the neck. This is done before painting the fret markers and strings, because it’s a *whole* lot easier not having to worry about getting any of this paint on top of those elements. This effect, as well as the completed neck, can be seen in the final image.

Precision

And while this is not the best image of the finished painting, I’m sure the gallery will have a very nice image of the painting online soon for you to enjoy.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this stroll down painting lane, and I look forward to doing it again in the future. A very pleasant 2008 to you all, and don’t forget to send your orders for possum paintings directly to the gallery.

Cheers.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 7:53 am and is filed under Precision. 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."