This evening I started working on the teeth on the upper half of the jaws and then on the side of the linear gear. I had to work with a bunch of new vanishing points, but am now pretty happy with the drawing. I “inked in” jaws and the linear gear in acrylic to get a feel for how they would look, before starting on the oil-based under-painting. The jaws use a blend of Paynes Gray, Raw Umber, Burnt Sienna, and Titanium White.

I finished my session by quickly painting in the table top and shadows using a thin wash of Prussian Blue, Burnt Umber, and Titanium White from Winsor Newton’s Artisan line of water mixable oils. Overall I like the look, but I think the final background should be lighter along the top edge, and probably less saturated.

This evening I fixed the perspective problems in the knurled adjustment knob and then began “inking in” some of the darkest darks that have hard edges. Normally, I’d start by covering the entire canvas with a rough under-painting layer of diluted oils, but in this case, I want to retain the precise, dimensional nature of the drawing, so I’m marking key landmarks first with acrylic Mars Black and Raw Umber. These shapes will show through the initial washes of oil paint. I am being careful not to touch any of the darks that have soft edges. These softer, more organic shapes will be done in the next pass with oil paint.

I did some more work on the drawing for the new pipe wrench study. The extreme foreshortening presents real challenges, making it important to understand the wrench’s complicated geometry. Even though the wrench is an engineered object, few of its edges and surfaces are parallel. This means that the image has multiple vanishing points.

The extreme foreshortening also wreaks havoc with cylinders and circles. In the picture below, I’ve fixed some of the issues with the linear gear perspective, but I still need to work on the knurled adjustment wheel.

I’m starting a new study for the pipe wrench. In this drawing for the study, I have fixed some perspective problems and more carefully drawn the teeth in the jaws. I’ve also revealed a bit more of the linear adjustment gear on the left side of the image. This is a 16″x20″ canvas and the marks are from an Indigo Blue Prismacolor Premier Colored Pencil. I find these pencils are good for drawing on canvas. They are waxy so the lines stay put and don’t mix into the paint. They come in a wide variety of colors and values so it is always possible to choose a color that won’t show through the paint.