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Winter Evening: Step 18

After spending so much time working on the background, it is always a great pleasure to finally get to paint the figure. After all, without the girl in the chair, this would just be a painting of some room with a fire in it. The figure puts the other elements of the painting into context, and gives them a specific purpose. The fire is now not just a fire in a room, but a luxurious source of warmth and light to relax and read in.

I almost always begin by painting the face. There are plenty of technical reasons why this is usually the case, (most having to do with the overlapping of the hair and shirt etc.) but I also like to have the face finished to set the tone for the rest of the figure. This painting is a bit more stylized than most of my work (with the exception of a new height) and so required a bit more stylized figure. More and more often I will use the reference material to sketch the face, get the proportions correct, lay out the basic values and begin the painting, but then, as the face takes shape, put the reference away and finish without it. It is much easier to focus on the essential elements of the expression and the mood of the figure when I am not concentrating on each little freckle the model may have. If there is something I can’t quite work out, I can always get the reference photos back out and consult them. To try and get the effect of the firelight in this painting, I mixed the colors based on those in the fire, and on previous figure painting experience, and not based on the reference material at all. (The reference photos were taken in artificial white light, not firelight.)

With each painting this process gets a little easier, and I am happier with the results. Not always right away, in fact the face tends to get repainted or reworked more than just about any other part of the painting…but the end results are what matters. The next step will be to finish the hair and begin work on the rest of the skin tones.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 6th, 2004 at 6:28 pm and is filed under Winter Evening. 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."