Your Daily Painting: Paying attention to the Surface

3 daily painting studies.

White Onion & Garlic 6"x8" Oil on linen mounted to panel

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Red Onion 6"x 8" Oil on linen mounted to panel

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 Onions and Garlic 12"x 6.5" Oil on linen mounted to panel

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Here I have three examples of some root crop I painted from the local farmers market. I really enjoy painting the different textures and subtle earth tone colors of onions etc. The colors and textures are quite opposite to most fruit, which typically have shinny surfaces along with more intense colors.

In Onions and Garlic above, I particularly found the green onions to be a challenge. Primarily because the bulb has a translucent skin. But going up the stalk in turns  more opaque. And the little roots are simply a challenge all to themselves, don't let them overtake your painting - simplify them.

So if you are painting still-lifes you might want to try alternating painting fruits and vegetables to help yourself better understand how to handle different surfaces. In regards to the surface quality, here are a few questions to ask yourself. Is the surface smooth or rough? How reflective is the surface? And also, is the surface opaque or translucent, or perhaps I should say, how translucent is the surface? 

It's very hard to answer these question here because there are so many variables. But in asking these questions as you paint it will simply help you be more aware and responsive to the subject and hopefully see what is "actually there". Paint what you really see. I will be going over these concepts more thoroughly in later posts.

~Don't forget to squint~

Painting Demo at Scottsdale Artist's School

 

Getting a likeness with no features

This is a demo I did during my week long workshop at the Scottsdale Artists' School, April, 2014.

As you can see I didn't get very far, but believe it or not I accomplished my goal. The main principle I wanted to impart was that features are not really what makes a portrait look like a specific person--it's the big shapes. During the week, this study was seen by many people and everyone who saw it knew instantly who the model was.

Students: So think about that the next time you're painting a face. Try to paint it with no features then step back and ask yourself if it looks like the person you're painting. 

 "...If you work on a head for a week
without indicating the features you will have learnt
something about the modeling of the head." --J.S. Sargent

My second goal was to work with temperature to turn the form because there was a very tight value range in the face. Meaning, other than the darks in the eyes and hair and the highlights on the skin there were only two values. So that gave me a lot of room to play with color variations that were in the same value range. Sorry the photo really doesn't show those little variations- it's a bit blurry.

The other major principle I discussed during this demo were edges and how powerful they can be in drawing the viewer's eye to the center of interest.