Monthly Archives: November 2013

On a Roll

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I made a lot of progress this evening, painting glass and brass.

The brass bowl was actually pretty easy to paint. First I used some Permanent Alizarin to clarify clarify the shape of the bowl on the left side. Then I mixed up a greenish hue, consisting of Cadmium Yellow Light and French Ultramarine Blue, desaturated with a bit of Burnt Sienna. I painted the bowl from dark to light, and then went back with a brush loaded with a mix of Permanent Alizarin Crimson and Cadmium Red to color the reflections of the cloth and desaturate the green.

For the bottom of the decanter, I mixed up a fairly bright greenish white, using a mixture of Yellow Ochre and French Ultramarine Blue. I painted the glass at the bottom with the darkest mixture and then streaked in lighter values, in some cases, applying white straight out of the tube. I also used a thin, transparent green to desaturate the purple representing the top surface of the wine.

I used the same technique for the bases of the wine glasses. At this point I still need to adjust the roundness and then paint the glass at the top.

This is the painting at the end of the evening. Not bad for a few hours of painting. Now I can go over the entire painting, adjusting shapes, values and colors, while making decisions about hard and soft edges.

Here’s my punch list for the painting:

  1. Lighten the left side of the table.
  2. Darker, more painterly, scumbled background.
  3. Finish the top of the glasses.
  4. Wine glass shadows should start at stems.
  5. Adjust shape of glasses and bottles for consistent eye level.
  6. Extend decanter shadow onto cloth.
  7. Rework the colors and folds in the cloth for better contrast and more realism.
  8. Adjust color of right side of table to match left side.
  9. Paint glass effects in middle of decanter.
  10. Rework cork for more contrast and detail.
  11. Add details like stems and shadows under cloth, bottles, and glasses.
  12. Add highlights.

Value Scale

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Gary showed me this simple method for judging values in my painting. He uses an eleven step value scale, much like Ansel Adams’ Zone System. Gary’s scale has six primary values, numbered 1 through 6, and five half-steps that lie in between. His insight, which seems obvious in retrospect, is that you can use standard palette colors, straight from the tube as examples of values on the scale. The picture below shows five of the standard palette colors with their positions on the value scale.

In a typical painting,

  • White will be reserved for specular highlights.
  • Prussion Blue will be reserved for the darkest darks.
  • The shadow values will start at Burnt Sienna.

This means the bulk of the mid tones will have values in the narrow range between Yellow Ochre and Burnt Sienna.  Mid tones are important – they make or break a painting – but they are hard to nail because they occupy such a narrow portion of the value scale.

Gary recommends figuring out the mid tones by process of elimination. Start with the knowns, like the blackest blacks in the shadows and the whites of the specular highlights. Then work your way up out of the darkest shadows towards the mid tones. Once your figured out the shadows and the highlights, all that is left is the mid tones, and by this point, you have a lot of paint on the canvas to help you make judgment calls.

Gary also stressed the importance of using the entire value scale in order to make the painting more interesting. It doesn’t matter whether the scene is light or dark – you use the entire range. If it is a night scene, streetlights and stars will be pure white, and the moonlit mid tones will be blues with values between Yellow Ochre and Burnt Sienna. If it is a sunny day in White Sands, New Mexico, the glint of the sun will be white, and the sunny sand will be made up of mid tone grays with values between Yellow Ochre and Burnt Sienna. In both cases, the shadows will start at Burnt Sienna and go all the way to Prussian Blue.

Making Progress Again

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I just returned from a trip abroad, so this is my first post in a couple of weeks. Gary is at the Hermitage in St Petersburg, so Jim Phalen is our guest instructor for the week. Jim is a master of paint surface techniques and very knowledgeable about art theory and history. The photos below show my progress for the week.

In my first session back, I worked on the reds, painting the apples and the cloth.

I took Jim Phalen’s advice and extended the Burnt Sienna underpainting across the white tabletop. Then I notched out part of the cloth on the right side in the back to make the composition more interesting.

Painted the pear and the tip of its stem.

Painted the tabletop, the inside of the decanter, and the cork.

Darkened the front edge of the table.