Apr 11 2009
Work in Progress.
In my studio, I work with a background of music, videos of art instruction, or anything else that helps me switch to the right brain. I usually work from photos (generally ones that I have taken) in my studio. Today’s work in progress is one that has been circulating in magazines for years. Whoever is taking the picture always stands in exactly the same place – so it’s difficult to attribute the picture to one source or another.
I rarely use everything in a photo, because often a good photograph does not always translate one-for-one into a good painting: the photograph is missing the artist’s license to translate a scene into the emotions and impressions that the painting will represent.
The painting below is really a value study, in acrylics. (Helen Van Wyk really impressed me with this technique.) Eventually, I will complete this in oils. In the meantime, my wife suggested that I keep this one, frame it and place it in our art leagues show. So I shall, and do another that I will complete in oils.
In starting a value study like this, I use three colors: black, white, and pthalo blue. Mixing black and blue results in what is known as Payne’s gray, and this adds a little variety to the grays that you obtain. I first prepare the canvas with the gray tone, and then proceed to block in the masses of black, grays and white. I do not do any preparatory sketch, as I have already studied the picture and have the design, layout, and then simply put in the shapes, adjusting the white to gray for that part of the building in shadow, and those parts where the building goes from one direction to another, or the nooks and corners of the building.
Figure 1 – Value Study – (A street in Tryon, NC, USA)
