The Ugly Duckling Phase.

The ugly duckling faze. It's that girl in grade school everyone loved to picked on until puberty, then you find yourself sweaty, slightly smelling of body odor, full of pimples and wondering if she's forgotten about the time when you tied her shoelaces together and she fell down and got a concussion. "Do I even have a shot will my pizza face? what's that smell?"...but I'm getting off track here.

This is a very basic block in for my Spanish Civil War painting. All of my paintings go through this stage. Here I'm using all cool earth tones, over a cool ground. I'm thinking very basically about general large tones and values. Everything is essentially two values, one being the light middle-tone, the other being a dark half-tone.

This stage always gives me anxiety because before getting my education this was about as far as I could get before being completely in the dark on how to proceed. I understand the desire a lot of painters have in wanting to get through this stage as quickly as possible, or skip it entirely if you're able.

But I think this stage is critical in some ways for as difficult as it may be to stay in, because it allows for the consideration of the whole in different aspects than from drawing. It gives me the chance to compose in color, to set myself up for juggling the harmonies that will help guide the composition.

Here is where the designing really starts for me. Going from line to color and value can alter the relationships of things and so there's the struggle of trying to be flexible, while not letting it derail me.  I did more than one color study, but here is when I can start to specifically visualize how I'm going to plot my color relationships. Every little character has to be dressed, which means it has to look natural while still being designed.

For this painting I'm tackling it in groups. Every group connects to every other group as far as colors go in one way or another. I feel that if I can do it without making it look obvious, it will help to unify the work. Thankfully, the further back you go in history, the more prominent earth tones become, especially in times of war.

With the block-in done, I had to sit down and reorganize my references, and break everything down into sections. As I work through more layers in this painting, I'm collecting a substantial amount of references, so keeping them all organized has really helped me gain more focus. It also makes working much easier as I don't want to have to stop for very long and go digging for reference material when I could be painting.

So the first pass is done! Now only a million more to go. Another blog about the second and third layers will be up as soon as I get through the second and third layers... But just to give you an idea I've included a shot here below, with the two figures in the foreground in the second stage, compared to the nearly indecipherable blobs behind them.

"Those blob creatures are coming right for us!"

The art of the study.

The artist's study is one of those cherished entryways into the working methods and mental states of the craftsman doing them. Some seek them out from others they admire as one would a cipher to a code that could unlock secrets of lost technique. Studies also tend to have a charm to them in a way not always found in the finished works. The sketch has in its own right become an art form in itself, where once artists did them to gain a better understanding of the subject they were about to paint, artists now have taken away from the subject and turned the object of the studies into the primary focus.

I would argue that some of Ingres studies are better
than his finished paintings.

I don't see the point in this, but I do see the purpose of doing studies in preparation for a painting, there's really no end to the amount you can make before starting one. Here are a few key points I keep in mind when doing my studies:

Trying to get a feel for the likeness of the
main character, Edward Norton.

There's no place for worry; It's a study, you can't forget that. A study is for you, not your facebook friends, or a competition, or other painters perceptions on what something should be. I've never been able to paint well when there were worries on my mind. You have to freely attack the study, see what comes so you can build off of what you discover.

Experiment; Any inclination you might have, any chance of a 'what if,' or 'why not,' you should indulge. Try things in a study that you would never try in a more serious work because you simply never know what can come from it. Instead of copying someone else's technique, experimenting allows you to develop your own solutions to the problems you are about to face. Develop your own voice, just copying technique is trying to fit your message into another painters tune.

Stop and start and stop and start and...; It's a study, you have no obligation to it other than what it can do for you, but think about it like this, in every other art form, the artists tirelessly practice in order to get ready for the end performance, or final draft. Your final painting is the opening night of a play, would you dream of going into it cold? A dancer spends months preparing their bodies so that when the task comes to delivering the performance, they don't need to think about the specific movements, just the expression of the movements inside the harmony of the music. If you want your final painting to be as good as it can be, you must prepare. 

Portrait study of my beautiful girlfriend. Getting the
feel of flesh tone in the light I want, and the various
colors of  stone that will be in the painting.

Educate yourself; I'm sure I'm not the only painter who thinks back on their past pictures and wonders how much better it would be if I had to paint it again. I try to get into the mentality of the object, I ask myself why it feels a certain way when I look at it, what kind of impression gives it its substance. I try to gain that insight when doing my studies.

What is the purpose of this? This is the most important question I ask myself when painting. Everything you put into a picture can either add or take away from the narrative. Is what I'm adding helping or hurting the work? What is its relationship to everything else? A multitude of questions come to me from asking what the purpose is of the object I'm putting into the painting. This helps me stay critical of myself. There's a fine line in a work of art between having a good idea firmly developed, versus a number of good ideas all competing for attention, and never fully realized because one is competing with another. It's easy to lose harmony and cohesion by indulging every whim. 

The more I paint, the more I see the need to get as many of the obviously stupid mistakes out of the way, make room for the more clever, stupid mistakes. The things that end up giving me a hard time are never what I expect.

Scribbles and lines.

Okay I've finally finished the corrections, and have gotten the go ahead. This is the evolution of the composition;

The first rough, more exactly based off my sketch. The problem with not developing the much smaller cartoon was that I hadn't fully worked out the background on the left. This made for an awkward, simplistic and unimaginative setting.

Having developed the city further, I added more figures and started playing around with the placement.

Here just the figures on the right have changed, I'm seeing if placing them partly out of the canvas helped with the tension, but realized that the woman's feet was crucial for keeping her attached to the scene.

The final composition, the patron wanted more focus on the two main figures the story is based on, and wanted them interacting with the scene more than what they were, in addition to more emotion. There also needed to be more of an emphasis on the executions happening, which meant getting rid of one figure, and moving around some others.

 My biggest enemy throughout the entire composition was/is scale and perspective. Yes, I learned perspective in college, but it's not something that comes easy to me. Also, figures in space going into perspective on a slight incline...not exactly things that get covered at an Atelier.

I've come to realize that I need to do more landscapes of cities, those objective buildings and their straight lines and unbending forms! Not fun, it made me wish I had a nude to work on. I used to use landscape as a way to get away from people, but when doing a painting about people in a landscape, all the tree paintings in the world won't help with solving the problem of scaling a figure properly in space.

What I did to understand the scale was pick a street that had the incline I needed and then I took references using the lines in the sidewalk as markers. It turns out sidewalk lines here go by five foot intervals, so every five feet I got a shot of a figure going back about 150 feet. Here are a few for example.

 Working on this street, in the overcast light like this, allowed me to stage the scene. Mapping out how wide and how deep it really would be, and what the figures look like in that space. The sidewalk gave me lines to work from while getting the figures on the canvas. It set me up to be able to compare all of the figures to the five foot intervals. Otherwise I would have had no basis for comparison because I didn't have 28 or so figures to pose all at once.

From there I drew the figures directly in charcoal because I said to myself, "I hate doing transfer drawings," stupidly not accounting for the fact that I would make mistakes and need to move things around. Moving things around meant having to re-size and transfer the figures way too many times to count. My only regret here is that I wasn't better at digital work, I could have drawn everything out digitally and moved them all around much easier. This is something I'm slowly working to rectify.

But the composing and sketch is done, time to start painting. I would like to thank some of my friends who were kind enough to lend their careful eyes and minds to critiquing these little scribbles. It really does help to have people you trust look over your shoulder once in a while.