I took one of the value studies from the last post for this experiment. This painting in oils is a work in progress, based on a slide taken by my grandfather many decades ago. I’m experimenting with textures, colours and perspective.

Perspective has proven to be the biggest challenge. I thought I had a reasonable understanding of the basic theory — vanishing points, horizon lines, fields of view — but the practice of actually drawing objects in space threw up some problems.

Even though I was pretty much copying directly from a photo, I wasn’t aiming for a completely accurate copy. Instead, I wanted to be able to move things around a little or even invent things completely but still be able to make the objects and figures work together believably in the final composition.

Despite the charcoal value study, the first attempt was just a bad composition. Even though all the elements that I wanted to paint were included in the picture, there wasn’t enough space at the bottom and the composition looks cramped.

I pretty much erased this completely by scraping back and painting over.

Next, I had trouble in making the rowing boat sit flat on the water. It’s almost perpendicular to the harbour wall, but not quite, so it almost shares the same vanishing points as the harbour wall, the steps and the boat (which is moored parallel to the wall). Boxes in perspective are relatively simple, but this rowing boat has all sorts of curves and bulges which complicate things.

The most important angle to get right, I found, was the shadow shape at the rear of the boat. It has an acute angle going off to the left vanishing point, then a curve down, following the near side of the boat. This doesn’t look right in the picture above, and the overall size of the boat is wrong.

The boat is sitting better on the water now, though I think the reflection on the right needs some correction. Even though the brush strokes are fairly rough, I’m reminded of the Stapleton Kearns neck tattoo: “LOOSE HANDLING WILL NOT DISGUISE WEAK DRAWING!”

Next, came the figures on the left. Again, they’re based on the slide, but I wanted to be able to move them around and change them at will. The main problem is that the man on the left is too small compared to the woman and boy. Andrew Loomis has some useful illustrations in his book Successful Drawing (available in print, but I think there are some PDFs floating around the internet somewhere). He states the rule for scaling figures on the ground plane:

All figures of the same height, when standing on the same ground plane, will be crossed by the horizon at the same vertical point on the figure.

In other words, if you’re looking at a number of figures on the harbourside who are all of the same height but standing in different positions relative to the viewer, the horizon line will cut through all the figures at the same point. In this case, the horizon line cuts through the figures at roughly hip level. So if they are all the same height, the horizon line should pass through all the figures at hip level, no matter where they are standing.

In this painting, however, the figures aren’t the same height — the man should be taller than the woman and boy. So, I’ve drawn a very small man!

Here is the original with a perspective grid overlaid. (Click the image for a larger version.)

And here’s the figure on the left at a more believable size, corrected in Photoshop.

Ok, enough theory. Time to get the brushes out again…

This camellia was painted fairly quickly from life in oils. I thought the direct sunlight glowing through the leaf would only last for half an hour or so at most, but in the end it lasted for a few hours and the subject didn’t change dramatically as the sun moved across the sky. I didn’t really have a plan for what to do if it did disappear apart from following the rule ‘Don’t chase the light.’

These A4 canvas sheets are temporarily fixed on a board using masking tape, and often the edge of the tape gets lost as I paint the dark background. This gives the impression (as I’m painting) that the edge of the picture is farther out than it really is, and this can lead to problems of the composition appearing too cramped when I finally peel off the tape.

One way around this would be to retape the edges to make the boundaries clear again. But perhaps the best solution is to decide in advance how a picture like this would eventually be displayed, taking in to consideration the size of mat board or overlap of a frame, and then work back from there to find the working area. A temporary mat board cut to size and placed over the work in progress can help with this.

This should have been straightforward — I was drawing from a photo (from New Masters Academy) on to a prepared ground of leftover mud from a previous painting, smoothed on to a sheet of acrylic gessoed canvas. The surface was smooth enough that the raw umber underpainting could be lifted or modified with a rag. I went straight in with the brushes and no initial drawing, knowing I could move the paint around at will.

At first I fell in to my usual mistake of making the drawing progressively bigger as it expanded out. I hit the right edge of the canvas, erased that, then ran out of room at the top. Then began the real problem of constructing a believable figure. No matter how much I moved lines around, it just didn’t look convincing, and I couldn’t work out where the problem was.

Finally, after a few hours of chasing paint around, I gave up and literally went back to the drawing board. I had to be able to make a decent drawing if I was to have a hope of making a painting worth looking at.

After multiple attempts with charcoal and crayon, I found I just couldn’t get this pose down on paper. It’s not a complicated pose. There is some foreshortening from the base of the spine up to the head, but nothing extreme. But I just couldn’t get a convincing pose by eye.

In frustration, I ended up tracing over the photo with my basic graphic tablet, just to get the feeling of what it would be like to draw the right lines. The results of this tracing, despite the scratchy, rapidly drawn contour lines, look way more convincing than my freehand drawing by eye.

This made me realise that getting an accurate, believable figure is essential. If the basic shapes are in place, you can get away with any kind of treatment of line or tone or paint — the figure will be convincing.

Back to the painting — I ended up taking photos of my painting revisions, then overlaying them on the original photo in Photoshop. By doing that I could work out that I needed to raise a curve here, lower a line there. I had given up being able to do this intuitively by eye. Instead, I was flying by instruments, relying on this feedback from a computer overlay.

I’m happy with some of the edge treatment — bringing things in to focus or losing them in a kind of abstraction was fun. But the figure still isn’t convincing to me. Something isn’t quite right, despite all this Photoshop intervention. I need another pair of eyes to tell me what’s wrong.

Ingres received ridicule and criticism for this painting La Grande Odalisque because of the unusual proportions. HIs contemporaries used to tease him by guessing how many extra vertebrae were needed for that spine to be possible. But Ingres was a superb draughtsman and knew what he was doing. If he needed a longer spine to create a more elegant figure, then that’s what he would paint. There’s a world of difference between deliberately distorting a figure for a particular effect and not being able to draw accurately.

This one was deliberately completed in one session in an attempt to make me focus on the important elements of building up a painting. It’s so easy for me to get locked in to one particular area which grabs my attention rather than concentrating on developing the entire painting systematically. So the goal of finishing the painting in one go wasn’t so much to speed up the process but rather to get rid of woolly thinking and to have a plan, at least with regard to the mechanics of painting: laying-in, mixing colours, building up the lights and darks.

A large synthetic filbert was useful for creating the sage leaf shapes, and I used the end of the brush handle to scrape out some of the rosemary leaves. I’m sure there’s a whole range of these Bob Ross techniques that I’ve yet to learn.

The crop of the picture makes a big difference to the final effect. Left as I painted it on the A4 canvas, the subject seems lost and flat, but is improved by a tighter, more square crop.

And to continue the efficiency drive, the laborious clean up of brushes after oil painting can be avoided by dipping the brushes in safflower oil with a few drops of clove oil added. Wipe off any excess paint before dipping, then either leave them on a brush holder or put them in a plastic bag. The slow-drying oils keep the bristles supple and in good condition for days if not weeks. At the next painting session, just remove the excess oil with a rag and continue painting. Full instructions for using brush dip and brush care in general can be found here.

This is a copy in oils of a painting by Felicia Forte which impressed me with the way the image was built up of flat tiles of colour. Copying this style was an exercise in making deliberate strokes with plenty of paint (it was surprising how much paint was needed to make a solid tile) and was a good antidote to my tendency to apply paint thinly and then dab and fuss.

Instead, it ensures I make a decision, mix a colour, load the brush, apply the paint with one stroke. Then leave it. Assess what needs to be done, then repeat for the next stroke.

I think this would apply to any style of painting. The most valuable lesson for me was to not make a mark until I’d made a decision about the very next stroke, which sounds obvious, but it’s so easy to just dive in and hope for the best.

A copy in oils of Spring by Juliette Aristides. I love the way she makes vibrant colour stand out in a mostly neutral painting.

I copied this painting from the back cover of her book Classical Painting Atelier. In writing this post, I looked for an online version to link to and was surprised to find the original has a different crop (I didn’t realise that was a patterned column on the left) and lacks the red cast of the printed version which turned the original vibrant greens towards olive. It also has darker clouds in the background, making the flowers stand out even more, though this could be partly due to the glowing pixels of the screen. Paintings are notoriously hard to photograph, and I wonder if the true original looks different again.

So besides the overly-large blooms and the colour shift, one of the main differences that I can see between my copy and the book version is the handling of the edges. The original achieves a softness in both the background and the receding blooms which adds to the pop of the central flowers. The original is roughly twice the size of my A3 copy so paint handling at that scale might be slightly different, but I need to get more control over that final finish. Much of the beauty of a painting depends on the handling of edges: it’s not enough to just put down roughly the right colour in roughly the right place.

I was trying out two new tubes of paint which I hadn’t used before: cadmium yellow and pyrrole red. Up until now my palette used permanent rose (PV19) and imidazalone yellow (PY180), both of which are transparent and the yellow in particular gets lost in a mix, even though it’s a bright mid yellow on a white background. Cadmium yellow seemed to be the yellow on everyone’s palette and I couldn’t work out why it was so popular considering it’s often two or three times the price of other yellows. Now, after seeing how powerful it is when mixed with other colours and how sparingly it needs to be added, I see the value of having an opaque yellow. This might be a new way of creating a colour palette: as well as warm or cool versions of each primary, I could try transparent and opaque paints. Paint handling in mixes seems to be as much of a factor as the colour itself.

The pyrrole red (Winsor Red, PR255 and PR254) is much closer to orange than the permanent rose and also holds up well in a mix. In the past, I’ve sometimes found it hard to hit a bright mid red, so this is a useful addition.

I still prefer a limited palette, but it’s useful to see how shifting around to different pigments can change the way I think about mixing colour.