Still Life

Jan312016

Still Life in Color

Here is, as promised last time, the colored exercise of my previous still life.
For this exercised I tried using a limited palette: Cadmium Yellow Light, Permanent Rose, Ultramarine, Burnt Sienna, Yellow Ochre.
I laid down the first layer as thinly as I could, still trying to follow Harold Speed’s advice. I thinned my paint with the 50/50 mixture of linseed oil and turps. (Photos have been taken under different lighting conditions, hence the huge difference in tone)
I let this try, then went for a second layer a week later.

I had lots of trouble with the spoon’s shadow on the inside of the saucepan. Another week to dry (well, I just didn’t have time to finish it) and the result is the first image. In the last passage I made the greens on the bottle a lot more saturated as they were way too gray.
Finally, here is a photo oh my setup. I took it lower than my point of view for the painting, that’s why perspective is so different. Onto flowers now!

Jan172016

Still Life – more tone exercises

Continuing on the series of Tone Exercises proposed in Harold Speed’s Oil Painting book, I setup a simple still life in my studio. I will post the photo next time, with the color study, but for now I just wanted to mention the bottle is green and the front sauce pan of a bright red. I had trouble trying to match tones and the different qualities of the objects (like the wooden spoon), so, in the end, I think I didn’t take the coffee pot to a decent finish, probably because it was so worn and brushed that it barely had any reflection in terms of value (more in color).
Here 2 previous steps of completion. The goal was once more to try to use paint as thin as possible, while preserving its opacity. I probably didn’t do it enough, but I am happy with the result.

I used once more Burnt Umber + Titanium while, fairly thinned with a mixture of Turpentine and Linseed Oil (50/50). The board is a simple wooden panel with 4 coats of gesso.

Stage 1

Stage 2

p.s. There was no actual color shift, I just took the photos under different lighting conditions

Dec272015

Experimenting sketchy shading

Once more following Artur Guptill’s “Sketching and Rendering in Pencil”, I somehow tried to applied the sketchy way of rendering shading he describes in Chapter IV, Part I.
I used a single pencil, 2b Mars Lumograph, although it’s recommended to use different grades for finished pieces. I guess this is fine since mine was more of an experiment. I setup a pretty simple still life with old, rusty metal objects:
(notice the camera angle was slightly different from mine when I was drawing).
As you can see from my notes on the side, it took me roughly 3 hours. More to get the drawing accurate, to be honest, since the shading was pretty quick and probably not careful enough.