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Vantage Point: Step 1

Vantage Point

Welcome back to the Artist’s Studio. While the gallery has been expanding, Sara, Asher and I have been moving into a new home as well. For anyone familiar with the Salt Lake City area, we are in Draper which is at the south end of the valley, and have a nice view of most of the city and of Kennecott Copper. The main entryway of the house is now my new studio, and what better way to break in a new studio than with a little figure painting? This will be a relatively simple composition: a woman sitting on a concrete balcony, looking down into the city below. The straight lines and rough textures of the steel and glass building in the background and the concrete in the foreground will be a nice contrast to the female figure, and whether you identify with the woman in the painting or with the viewer of the entire scene, the theme is the same: beauty.

I am working from only one piece of photographic reference material, which includes the figure, the concrete ledge, and background elements, which can be easily tweaked to portray the side of a glass and steel building. There will be no need for a study or a scale sketch, and I will be taking a more relaxed approach to the order and level of completion of the various elements in the picture.

I began with a 20 X 32 inch linen canvas sized with acrylic and primed with white lead in oil tinted with a touch of burnt umber. To add a bit of warmth to the canvas I then added a thin wash of burnt umber and ivory black in a mixture of linseed oil and turpentine. As soon as the canvas was dry, I sketched the figure and the basic geometry of the background with white chalk. Correct proportions can be tricky to keep track of while standing next to a canvas this size, so I measured in a few reference points: the tip of each foot, the top of the shoulder, the top of the head and the right knee. I sketched as lightly as possible until I was happy with everything, and then darkened the main lines, wiping away any that were distracting.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 8th, 2005 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Vantage Point. 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."