I had so much fun painting this hand. Now that the new technique is getting more familiar, I am able to concentrate less on the technical side of things, and more on the aesthetic. I have always enjoyed painting hands. I find them to be often just as expressive as faces. This one was also lit in a very beautiful way, and so gracefully draped across the foot. As with the other flesh in this painting, I started out with an under-painting which was allowed to dry, and then came back with the flesh-tones, working into a thin layer of oil and burnt umber. In between those two steps, I decided to begin dropping the background into place. Having been on a bit of a concrete bender lately, I dove right in. I was already really pleased with the floor, and was limited by the reflections as to the basic set-up of the wall behind the figure. As soon as I finished it, however, I disliked it completely. It was far too busy and flat. I would eventually paint over it. At this point I was also beginning to think about what would be outside the windows.

Before moving on to the over-painting on the legs, which would represent a very large area of uninterrupted flesh-tones painted in a still somewhat experimental technique, I decided to paint the polished concrete floor on which the figure is sitting. This was pretty straight forward, as I had really good scrap of the concrete surface (though in the photos the surface consisted of a concrete coffee table, and I had to extrapolate the effect to the edges of the composition). Once that was complete, I started work on the legs, the right (and in this composition, the most distant and simplest) first. By the time I had finished work on the right leg, using the same basic technique as I had on the right arm, I was feeling much more confident with the new technique. In fact, the left leg, which should have been the most difficult part of the painting, was finished in only two six hour sessions, and turned out to be what I still consider to be some of my finest flesh painting to date. Even the foot went smoothly, the complex anatomical layout having been completely taken care of by the under-painting. So far, I’m loving this technique.

By now the arm was dry enough for the over-painting. As I had with the face, I started by applying a very thin, transparent and almost colorless wash of burnt umber, turpentine and linseed oil over the entire arm. Then I mixed a string of flesh tones from titanium white, burnt umber, yellow ochre and cadmium red, and gradually worked the colors into the glaze layer, allowing the paint to remain translucent in the transition to the shadow areas and almost transparent in the shadows themselves often leaving the under-painting showing through. Only in the most direct light did I put down an opaque layer of paint. The glaze made blending exceedingly easy, and I was able to adjust the hues and chroma (color intensity) of the flesh tones on-the-fly right on the canvas as I went along. It was a little harried at first, but good practice, especially as I knew I would have to eventually do the same thing with the large section of continuous skin on the left leg, and it would have to be done in one sitting before the glaze layer began to tack up…around 7 hours at the outside. No pressure.

But first the under-painting on the legs would have to dry. In the mean time I worked on the skirt. The light shining through the fabric made for really fun painting. I started in the back (in relation to the picture plane) where the effect of the translucence was the most pronounced.

Next I moved on to the front section, starting on the right to keep my hand away from the fresh paint as I moved along.

And finally I finished with the hem along the edge of the skirt.

The under-painting for the arm was a simple enough project, but its size combined with my relative inexperience with the technique meant that it took most of a full work day to finish. The good news is I learned a lot about controlling the transparency of the paint, and keeping the surface smooth in the process, and later areas of under-painting went much faster.

Over the next few days, I worked on the shirt. Moving in a general right to left direction (I’m left handed… this way I’m less likely to set my hand down into freshly applied paint) I painted sections of the shirt, trying to finish each day along a large wrinkle or break-line so that the next day’s work would join up seamlessly.

Here is a better shot of the finished shirt:

From the beginning, this painting was going to be all about the figure. The background would be almost inconsequential, aside from adding special context and justifying the lighting, so I planned to put an unprecedented amount of work into the subtleties of the facial features and flesh tones. I wanted to work on refining the two-stage glazing method I have been experimenting with, where a complete monochromatic under-painting is then gradually worked over with the other flesh tones. Usually, I would have tried to complete the area in one sitting, blending the flesh-tones into the still wet under-painting. This time though, as I was working on the burnt umber and ivory black under-painting, I discovered some problems with my drawing, and ended up spending the entire day carefully refining the likeness of the face. By the time I was happy with it, the paint was already tacking up. This first image is of the under-painting as I left it.

At this point the painting was set aside while I worked on Monna Vanna and prepared for the QCFA Arts Cruise. While on the cruise, I received the final go-ahead on a commission for BB&T which I began work on as soon as I returned home. So this canvas sat around in my studio in this state for more than 2 months before I got back to it. Needless to say, by that time the under-painting was quite dry.

I wasn’t quite sure how I would proceed. I considered an opaque over-painting which would have completely covered the likeness I had worked so carefully on, and I even though about removing the under-painting and starting over. At the last minute, I decided to try a variation of a technique I used to get some of the atmospheric effects in First Heat. I painted a very thin glaze layer of burnt umber in oil over the entire under-painting, and painted the flesh tones into that. I couldn’t believe how well it worked. The paint was not only easier to control, but the polished under-painting allowed me to focus more on the flesh-tones. Even more to my delight, the transparency of the over-painting gave the skin a wonderful luminosity I hadn’t been able to achieve before.

I experimented with a similar technique while painting the hair, but with rather poor results. This second image shows the finished face, and hair that has been newly re-painted.

This is a relatively simple painting both in theme and in composition, but my hope is that the subtlety of the pose and the facial expression will add something a little more interesting. This painting began with a piece of scrap I shot almost as an afterthought during the photo shoot for ‘The Letter’. All told, I must have shot 25 different poses while I had the model available, and this one turned out to be my favorite. Not only was there a lovely structural composition in the angle formed by the arms and legs in relation to the torso, but the overall attitude of the figure, particularly the glance to the right opposing the direction of the body seemed to add a sense of inner action to an otherwise very quiet pose.

As is my usual practice, I began with a linen canvas, in this case 36 X 30 inches, sized with rabbit skin glue and primed with a mixture of lead white, ivory black, and burnt umber. Next, I worked from my photographic references to create as accurate as possible a drawing of the figure, paying special attention to the angular relationships in the pose that I thought were the most beautiful. Once I was happy with the drawing, I used a grid technique to transfer the drawing onto the canvas.

I have become increasingly wary of under-drawings eventually showing through the paint layers on top, and so I sketched the canvas in a very light venetian red, using a watercolor pencil. The drawing barely shows up in the first image below (taken straight from my camera), but with a little digital persuasion courtesy of Painter X, I was able to make it show up rather well in the second image.

I also suspect that I have discussed the actual process of paint application often enough that for many of you, the compositional setup and the prep-work for this painting were possibly the most interesting part…other than images of the finished piece. Add to that the long delays in new posts while the Gallery re-located to Sonoma and while I was studying in New York, and the fact that I actually completed this painting nearly a year ago, and it makes almost too much sense to skip to the end, summing up the high points along the way. So I will.

The gentleman who commissioned this piece suggested the title “Breaking Through” which I had to agree, fit the theme perfectly as well as described the way the house and the cliffs interact with each other. So here it is, the finished painting, “Breaking Through”:

When last I posted an image, the cliffs had just been completed, and there was an odd sort of house-shaped gap of naked canvas almost randomly breaking them apart and giving them a distinctly un-finished feel. So it was not only a lot of fun to paint the house in a model-building, creative sort of way, but also very satisfying in a filling-in-the-missing-pieces, puzzle completing sort of way. But to be chronologically correct, I should mention that because I was painting with a deadline, and because titanium white is one of the slower drying pigments on my palette, I actually painted the Architect’s shirt next. But I digress…back to the house. The concrete sections were painted first, in part because they most directly interacted with the cliffs and in part because I am relatively comfortable painting concrete and it allowed me to begin filling in the space, establishing the shadow lines which help place the house within the cliffs, and it allowed me to work out a rough value structure for the other materials. As I worked on the concrete, I tried to keep in mind areas where the lighting would be affected by the surrounding structure. Many of those decisions are subtle, but you can easily see an example on the bottom surface of the third concrete balcony from the bottom on the right side. Not only is the glass reflecting light, but I imagined a partially covered pool in that area that would be reflecting ripples of light onto the ceiling above it. Again, it is always easier if there is an actual visual reference for situations like this, but it is also exciting to try and work through the intellectual puzzle of the play of the light in your head and on the canvas…especially if there is no exact visual reference available.

I painted the vertical flagstone walls next. Here it really helped to have the shadows on the concrete already painted, since there was more than enough to think about in creating a random pattern for the shape and color of the individual stones while also trying to keep them level with respect to the angles of the house and the linear perspective work I did in the scale drawings. The last time I spent this much time painting individual rocks was when I painted the railroad tracks in “Motive Force”.

There are only a few sections of roof that can be seen from this angle, but they were painted next. I was envisioning bronze with a dark patina to compliment the flagstone.

The last, and also the most enjoyable part of the house to be painted was the glass. This was also a study in modeling which consisted mostly of picturing what the sky and cliffs would look like if the viewer were to slowly rotate through a full 360 degrees, and then reflecting that view in the glass appropriately. In a few areas I also tried to show the transparency of the windows where light from the east would have been visible through the house and where the lighter area of the sky would be visible through the skylights.

Once I was happy with the house and the cliffs… with the background in general, I turned to the figure of the Architect and the foreground. As I mentioned, I skipped ahead and painted the shirt before I even started work on the house. This turned out to be a really good idea, since the lightest areas of the shirt, the areas containing the purest concentrations of Titanium White, were still quite wet when I got around to painting the rest of the figure. I painted the rocks on which the blueprints are draped first which, after the two-week long crash course in painting rocks that was the cliffs, proved to be fairly straight-forward. The pants hardly show, and represented a light 4 hour session to finish. The blueprints, on the other hand, were a little more of a challenge. The model, an architect himself, brought actual blueprints with him to the scrap shoot to use as a prop. So I had really great reference material to work from for the play of light on the paper and the general perspective of the lines of the house plans as they wrapped around and over the ripples of the pages. When I shot the scrap photos, I used a stool, a couple phonebooks and some other handy junk to try and approximate the shape of the rocks under the blueprints and on which the architect is leaning, so the wrinkles and curves in the paper were easy enough to paint. The tricky part was replacing the existing image on the plans in the photo with a plan view for the house in the painting. I ended up painting the paper first, waiting for it to dry, and then glazing the house plans over the top. It worked out really well.

As has been my most common practice, I saved the figure itself for last. Traditionally, this has served not only as a sort of reward to myself at the end of the painting (the figure is always my favorite part to paint) but also keeps me from accidentally smudging paint on the finished figure while painting the background. Recently, I have realized an additional benefit to completing the background first, and that is light and color control. Flesh tones are some of the most subtle color choices that can be made during the course of a painting, and, as with all color choices, can be heavily influenced by the surrounding colors on the canvas. Having a complete context of color in place while painting the figure makes the process of choosing flesh tones not only easier, but much more effective.

Most often, the face of a figure is where the most emotional content is vested. In this case, however, since the face is turned away from the viewer, the hands say a lot more than the facial expression. While the right hand of the figure is supporting weight, leaving the majority of the expressive aspect to the left, both hands add to the composition. The model had a lot of really nice musculature in his hands and fore-arms, one of the reasons I ended up using him. But I still ended up exaggerating the play of the veins and muscles to evoke a feel of capable, experienced hands…hands that could work with stone or guide the razor-sharp tip of a drafting pencil. The left hand is tracing the lines of the plan while the eyes, presumably, are tracing the lines of the house itself. I liked the idea even while working on the first sketches and instructing the model how to pose, but when I was working on the painting, I started to see an interesting similarity to the way a musician moves their hands over an instrument, which seemed even more appropriate to the composition. The figure in this painting is one of my personal favorites that I have painted.

So, there you have it. One of the more challenging compositions I have painted, one of the largest, one of the most time consuming, one of the most instructive and certainly the most complex commission painting I have undertaken so far. Once again, I apologize for the lost images and the slow updates. I would be more than happy to answer any questions, of hear any comments, and I’ll see you again soon in the Artist’s Studio. Thanks for reading.

This kind of work is by far the most difficult, in my opinion. I would always rather have some direct reference, either live or photographic. However, I find that quite often, my compositions require either architecture or landscape that is simply not available. This is why, over the coming years, in addition to constant study of the figure, I will be working hard on landscape studies, architectural studies and still life painting. The more familiar an artist becomes with various subjects, the more effectively they can be integrated into larger compositions. I am really pleased with the way these cliffs turned out, but in ten years, I better be able to do better or I am stagnating as an Artist.

Once I had the canvas sketched, I began working on the sky.  The idea was to set the scene at sunrise, symbolizing a beginning.  I spent a fairly long day blocking in the sky in the image below.  I was referring to a set of photos I took in St. George, UT a few years earlier, and thought the colors and angles would create a real dramatic backdrop for the painting.

The next morning, I walked into my studio and realized the sky was far too busy.  There would be so much going on with the cliffs, water, and house, that it would be overkill.  Besides, who needs all the negative press associated with one of their paintings causing a series of seizures in unsuspecting viewers?  Not me.  I spent the next two days re-painting the sky.  This is how it finally turned out.  Did I mention these images were dark and grainy?  When you see the photos of the finished painting, you will see what I mean.  Oh, yeah…did I also mention that I had a sizable number of images vanish into the ether of a computer meltdown?  Consequently, the water is also finished in this second image.

Ok, exactly like that.  At last I had final approval on the composition, and was ready to actually begin the painting.  The first step was to stretch and prime the canvas, which was to be 55X34.  This sounds like an odd size, but it was based both on measurements of the space in which the painting would eventually hang, and on the Fibonacci ratio (A.K.A. the golden mean or Devine Proportion) of 1.618 to 1. For those of you who may be interested, the Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers given by starting with a zero and a one, and then adding the two consecutive numbers to get the next one.  0+1 is 2, 1+2 is 3, 2+3 is 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on.  The result of dividing two consecutive numbers in the series converges on 1.61803 as the numbers get larger.  This ratio is also the only number that differs from its inverse by exactly 1 (1/1.61803=0.61803).  So there’s today’s fun math fact.  Of more interest aesthetically is that the ratio shows up everywhere in the real world from the spirals in nautilus shells and pineapple skins to the relative lengths of the sections of a finger or of the upper arm to the lower arm.  And the Greeks thought it was pretty cool. Cool enough to declare it the most aesthetically pleasing ratio around.   I’m not claiming that I believe there is any superiority of this proportion in putting together a composition, but I do find it interesting. Incidentally, the horizon line is also placed based on a multiple of the same ratio.  I should mention that I didn’t set out to design the composition based on the Golden Mean, but when I checked the proportions in my comp sketch, they were so close that I decided to tweak them into compliance for the final painting. 

The next step was to find a model.  Oddly enough, after a few weeks of looking specifically for someone who fit the bill with no luck, the Greeks became involved in the painting for the second time.  Sort of.  Sara and I were enjoying a lovely lunch in a little Greek restaurant in Salt Lake, when Sara suddenly pointed out that there was a guy standing in line that looked exactly like the figure in my sketches.  Being my best model recruitment agent (and being a woman and therefore 75 to 80 percent less likely to get maced when approaching potential models), she immediately cornered the guy and made the pitch.  Not only was he interested in modeling, but coincidentally, was an actual architect and volunteered to bring a set of blueprints to the scrap shoot for use as a prop.

I put together this little combined image of the approved composition and the new house design to give myself a reference and the model some idea of what I was after.

Once I had all the reference photos, I sat down and worked out the final details of the composition incorporating the actual figure, all the perspective work on the house, and the final layout of the cliffs.  The image below is a scan of the resulting scale drawing which I then transferred to the canvas.