Just returned from five days in Chicago doing the Gold Coast Art Show downtown in Grant Park. It was quite an experience and I took loads of photos, so I’ll try to organize them and post about the show tomorrow. Unfortunately load out was quite physically demanding, I hurt my back and ended up at the emergency room first thing this morning. Between the muscle relaxers and pain killers the hospital gave me I slept most of the day. Did manage to get in a few hours of painting.

I decided to start this painting by doing an underpainting to help establish the values right off the bat. I took the photo of Trisha and desaturated it in Photoshop. Having the photo printed in a gray scale will help me easily determine the correct values.

I transferred the drawing onto the canvas by tracing it using graphite paper. The drawing doesn’t show up very well in this photo, but it is visible enough on the canvas to help me maintain the correct physical proportions.

Next I started mixing different values of burnt umber and white. You start with burnt umber, add a little white and mix it well. You want to start with a fairly large dollop of paint because you take half of that mixture, mix in a little more white, then take half of that mixture and mix in a little more white, etc. I ended up with nine piles of paint in values between the darkest burnt umber and pure white.

I have mixed and worked with as many as 30 values of paint. I took a workshop from Christopher Brian where he taught us to mix 20 values of a mixture of alizarin crimson and viridian. That makes a very dark purple-ish black and the different mixtures result in shades of gray. Having 20 values to choose from definitely made it easy to pick the right value – it was amazing that your eye could tell the difference between that many values. However, it also sucked all of the fun out of painting! It just made it very mechanical. This is the underpainting that I did in that workshop.

Christopher had set up a still life, taken a photo of it, desaturated the photo, and given each of the students a photo to use as a painting reference. After finishing the underpainting all we had to do was glaze thin layers of color on top. However, I was never excited enough about the painting to finish it.

This is what the painting looked like after a few hours of work. You can start to see the dimensions of the face and hands taking form, but I still have a lot of work to do on it. In the past I’ve been able to do underpaintings that looked more realistic than the finished piece. Why you might ask? Because once I started adding in the color instead of slowly building up thin layers of color I would start painting too thickly and lose the values. Then I’d have to start re-establishing the values and would waste a lot of time re-doing everything. I’ve gotten much better at doing thin glazes lately, so I’m hoping it will work out this time. Thin glazes over an underpainting is how The Old Masters worked and the technique really makes the colors glow.

When I was finished painting for the day I put the palette into an air tight plastic container and then put it into the freezer. This helps to keep the paints fresh for the next day. Normally I squeeze out new paints every day, but when  I’m working on the underpainting I’ll sometimes freeze them overnight. The oils don’t actually freeze, but it does keep them from drying and skimming over. It just takes a few minutes at room temperature for the paints to be usable again.  It’s not like you end up with a Paint Popsicle.