Life Drawings Vendredi Dernier

Our wonderful social club brought in a model last Friday. She was a really good model. Good in my books is: can hold a pose, can choose classic poses, does NOT do crazy unnatural poses. Forgive my crappy iphone camera.

 

Wedding Present

This is a painting I made for my friend's wedding present. It took me a long time to get the final sketch. I wanted something cute, not too realistic and something that had a Studio Ghibli/Pixar feel.

Here is the digital concept. Two children (a boy and girl) flying high in the clouds on their magic Radio Flyer wagon.

I have to say a big thank you to James Jean. He tirelessly documents his process on his blog and I've studied all his posts and his comments to help me with this project. He's probably the most generous artist out there.

It was a long time since I picked up my oil paint so I decided to do a small color sketch to get myself back into it. I felt really good about handling real paint again so I didn't finish the sketch. This panel is the same ratio that I chose the final piece but smaller -- 6x12, the final was 12x24.

The great thing about working digitally is I was able to shift and transform my drawing as I went along. My new Cintiq really made itself useful for this step. I just can't draw lineart on a standard Wacom Tablet. As you can see, I really changed the position of the figures. The boys face was looking away from us and the girl's arms where obstructing the view of hers. I think the final line drawing has a more dynamic feel -- and I also love goggles. Nothing says adventure like protective eye wear.

Here's the final sketch. I did a couple value studies to help me establish where the light and shadows are.

Next up is the dead color stage. The dead color stage is putting down the "average color and value" of the objects -- it's really just your best guess. No rendering is done at this stage but because this is digital, I did some really basic value changes to show the shadow side.

Update: I recently watched the movie Local Color (a great movie btw) and "local color" or "dead color" is described as:

"The color of an object before it is affected by its surroundings".

I thought that was a very nice way to describe this stage of a painting.

Now on to the real canvas. I printed out the lineart on my inkjet printer using just regular 8.5x11 copy paper. I taped the pieces together and used some no-name graphite transfer paper to get it on the canvas. The canvas was 24" by 12"panel. I wanted to use Saral transfer paper but the art store only had it in white but the no-name stuff worked really well. 

This is a terrible picture but after I transferred the drawing, I sealed it with a light coat of Liquitex Gloss Medium & Varnish. I never used this stuff before and did a quick test on a small panel. I put way too much on and it made the surface really too slick. So I did a really light coat, thinning with just a little water on the main art board.

After the seal dried. I covered the entire canvas with some thinned down Burnt Sienna. This stage is called the Imprimatura. The Imprimatura is a base color that has several uses. Firstly it eliminates the white of the canvas. It's harder to judge values when you have this huge white thing in your face. Everything is darker than white so getting rid of it is your first step. Secondly, the Imprimatura acts as a field color for the entire painting. For figures, a dark earth color is used, for landscapes maybe a green or blue. I've seen a painter use bright Cadmium Red as his Imprimatura!

I then brought back the white of the canvas for the light side of the painting. I used a mixture of Flake White and Titanium White. No reason really, I just never used Flake White before and it was on sale.

So here is the Dead Color stage as I did in the digital sketch. Again, it's just a flat block in of the average value and color of the objects. I thinned down the paint a little with mineral spirits. I don't want to paint too opaquely at this stage. I want to keep the drawing for as long as possible.

A closeup of some of the rendering.

Here is the final piece. You can see I made some changes due to time and personal taste. I removed the stars trailing them because I didn't know exactly how I was going to paint them. I thought I could make them glowing and bright but then that would introduce another light source and well I just axed it. Also because I was running out of time I removed the flower pattern on the girl's overalls.

I have another friend that's getting married next year and I'm going to start working on their painting as soon as possible.

The final painting. You can see the edge of a DVD case on the left side for size comparison.

Dermot Power reviews Painter 11

Dermot Power is one of my favorite artists in the film industry. I first saw his work on Star Wars Episode II. I really admired the tradional feel of his work that he achieves with Painter. Tonight, I just finished watching another film he worked on -- Harry Potter 3 (the last fun HP movie, imo). So I did a little Google search for "Dermot Power Painter" and got this. A truthful review of Corel's latest bugger - Painter 11. He speaks the truth about Corel adding gimmicks instead of refining the arguable best version; Painter 6 (the version I still use). I copied the text below but it sings true to the users of this once great piece of software.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R1Y9JUMJF9DMSN

3/5 stars - amazing but flawed, 3 Jul 2009

By Dermot Power

I have been using Corel painter since version 4 and think the best version is version 6. Since Corel took over the application it has seen some improvements; painting along a path is ingenious and the oil painting although of limited value to my own working method is really cool. But parts of it have got steadily worse with each release, brush size sliders are now 'drop down' (WHY?), dragging a brush out to place it on the canvas causes it to grow a large panel when the small icon would be infinitely better, the pressure sensitivity is jumpy at best (even with the new Intuos 4), the keyboard short cut for changing brush size is not accurate enough to be anything other than a gimmick, it would be much better to have the brush size slider appear at the tip. I could go on; I have a long list complaints collected over the years which I talked to Corel about but to no avail.

Painter is vastly better than photoshop for painting digitally and is the only application I would use but it is very flawed. The application is confusing and burdened with too many features that are not useful to a professional artist. The claims made for various brushes are nonsense...I would challenge someone from Corel to tell me the difference between say a 'fine tip marker' and a 'smooth round pen' ; they may be different under the hood but they look exactly the same when drawn on the canvas.

The new release Painter 11 is good for one reason; they finally introduced a 'polygon lasso'. but having bought it a few months back I don't use it because it is so buggy (missing strokes being the worst bug) and have gone back to 10. If you do buy it, my advice is to open the brush creator and switch off all the settings and experiment with each setting one by one, saving a brush when you get one that works. You'll soon have a collection that suits your working method. Also make use of the keyboard shortcuts; this is a fantastic feature which allows you to keep all the shortcuts at your non-drawing hand which means you can paint without ever looking away from the screen.

Painter is an application that needs to be wrestled free from those who want to add gimmicks to justify each new release and put in the hands of developers who would have the guts to strip it down to the great application hiding under all the garbage.