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« Still Lifes: History and Significance
Sisters: Step 12 »

Sisters: Step 11

Sisters

The next major area to be completed is the shirt. I was very pleased to find that the technique I described for painting the dress worked even better with these colors than it did with the white. The raw umber gave the paint a very silky texture that was extraordinarily easy to manipulate, especially when blending the highlights into the base color. I also found that it did not tack up nearly as fast, and I had much more open time to work the paint.

In my reference photos, the model is wearing a navy blue shirt. I decided to change the color to this warmer green-brown in order to preserve the warm color scheme of the composition. Incidentally, this image is not a very good representation of the finished shirt. The surface quality of the wet paint is reflecting a lot more light in the shadow areas than it will once the paint is dry and varnished. Unfortunately, I would have to shoot the photo from a pretty dramatic angle to avoid the problem. The image of the finished piece should be much better. You will also notice that I have already begun blocking in the skirt. I wanted to test the interaction between the colors of the shirt and the skirt to make sure they were playing well together before I committed to the new shirt color.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 16th, 2006 at 11:39 am and is filed under Sisters. 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."