Painting in Salamanca

Adding the Finishing Touches

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 19:25:00 +0000

Adding the finishing touches to a painting can be daunting especially if you are quite pleased with the result so far. You know you can take it just that little bit further but you don't want to over do it or even worse, ruin the painting altogether. In this article I discuss how to keep your nerve and move forward slowly, seizing ground until what you have before you is something you never thought you could have achieved.

So you've been working on a painting for a while, everything is in the right place, the colours are more or less what they are supposed to be, in fact everything is so almost perfect that you suddenly get blocked. Where do you go from here? Is this how it all ends? You had imagined taking it a bit further but your energy begins to wane, you don't want to ruin it or overdo it and it's not such a bad painting as it is, in time you'll probably grow to love the little imperfections and forget that you had such great dreams for it when you started. In the beginning you had been excited by a spark of inspiration, driven by the challenge of a new painting and the limitless possibilities of how it was going to turn out, everything flowed so easily and progress was made so quickly. Now you can see how it will turn out, the inspiration has faded and progress is slow as you fiddle with details. The muse has left you, or worse, is whispering in your ear to go and start a new painting.

Now I'm not saying that you should necessarily go on until you are completely sick of it, who knows, you may get so sick of painting it will put you off completely and you will be so traumatized by the experience that you won't pick up your brushes again for months. Maybe it is time to move onto something else which catches your imagination, after all the important thing is to keep painting so that you keep improving your skills. But once in a while you will want to take the painting just that little bit further, perhaps you imagined before you started that you were going to achieve something with this painting which you haven't reached yet, that this one was going to be special, a painting which would stand out among your other paintings, your own personal masterpiece. However, you doubt your abilities to move forward, you falter and are overwhelmed by the daunting task ahead of you, after all, you really don't know what bit to paint next.

I'm going to take you through the finishing touches of a self portrait I have just completed. As I have just described I was initially filled with enthusiasm, I wanted to do something spectacular, with reflections and rich colours that would be mouth watering. A feast for the eyes. I had the idea while making breakfast, all the colours in front of me were so vivid that I thought, this is it! This is what I've been looking for. As I walked though a pine forest near my home I envisioned what it would be like: to contrast with the yellows in the egg and orange juice I would paint myself wearing a bright red running top I had, like a cardinal in Rome performing a sacred rite. The viewpoint would be from above, like an observing angel, or an adult looking down on their child as they gleefully show their parent what they have just made. And so I would show the world, 'look what I've just made'.

It's good to start with delusions of grandeur, aim high, that's what I say. And so I did, but inevitably I ran out of steam and the struggle to finish prompted me to write a blog entry on the subject of the final stages of a painting. Here is my advice to those who find themselves in a similar position to me:

Observe and relax. If you don't know where to start just sit in front of the painting and compare it with the subject. Don't worry about what to do next but just spend time looking at the differences. Reset your mind and see the painting with new eyes.
Take it step by step, a little at a time. If you decide that one area is darker in the subject then darken it in your painting, if it is lighter, then lighten it. As you do this more things will become apparent and you can deal with them too, one at a time, each thing you work on bringing you closer to the final reward.
Work on what is easy, or interesting, first. The whole painting might be daunting to finish but surely there is one bit which is easy, or interesting, or exciting in a challenging way. Work on this and you will find that you build momentum. Plan to paint one part and you'll end up doing three or four, just because you have paint on your brushes and you can quickly get them in before you have a break.
Look at the painting as a whole. The final stages are when you bring everything together, make everything balance and work on the relation between each colour and the next so that it has that real quality. Sometimes one part of a painting may not look right because another part is out of balance with it. Try to see how everything relates to each other in the subject and translate this to the painting, don't just paint things how you imagine them to be. Even though you know the plate is white, you may need to paint it grey if it is grey in the context of light and shadow of the subject, otherwise you will never be able to make the real whites white.

So in my painting I got to a stage where everything was in place, the shapes and the shadows, and the colours were more or less right. I had had some trouble lightening the red in the top, if I added white it just looked washed out and if I added yellow it began to turn orange. The only thing to do was to buy a tube of cadmium red light, not a colour I usually have hanging around, finally I realised why all these deep and light variants are so useful, and it really did the trick. The top was transformed. I also worked on the trousers more. I had never forgiven myself for leaving the trousers unfinished in the Lucian Freud tribute I did upon his death, I suppose I could go back and finish them now but I've got lots of new paintings I want to work on so the trousers remain flat and formless. This time I intended not to make the same mistake so I went over the trousers trying to give them shape (too much as I later decided). This brought the painting to a nearly finished stage which started to make me want to leave it as it was.

But I could still see that the trolley on the left of the painting needed work, so I painted that and some other small details as I went. Now I was really beginning to feel it was time to lay down the brushes but my mum commented that the hands didn't look right. I was surprised as I thought the hands had a looseness which looked painterly, but now compared to the rest of the painting they did seem, in comparison, to lack detail.

I posted the painting on flickr under the title Enough For Now and had a break of a few days, I liked the painting as it was but knew that I could take it just that little bit further. After a breather I attacked the painting again. To help see the changes I made I have cropped the images and put them next to each other. The lighting was different in each photo so more of the grain of the canvas can be seen in the earlier versions, this isn't because of smoother paint in the final painting.

The first image shows a good example of working on a certain part of the painting by painting a different area. I was having trouble with the brightness of my whites, they just didn't seem light enough, this I finally decided was because other parts of the painting were lighter than they should be. The floor looked good but was slightly too light and unbalancing the rest of the painting. I darkened it and also darkened the lower drawers and cupboard while also working a bit more on the lines by defining them. The trousers also looked too shiny, they weren't really of a shiny material so they were taking away from the highlights on the top I was wearing, which was meant to be very bright. So I repainted them making the form less visible, and in this way emphasising the different fabrics and textures in rest of the painting.

The lines on the upper cupboards were also a bit wobbly and the extractor fan was a bit misshapen, and although I resisted using masking tape to get crisp lines, which I thought would look too sharp in comparison with the rest of the painting, I did my best to get the edges looking straight.

The grout between the tiles was too thick and dark and also not very straight. Although the painting was quite big I had trouble getting such thin lines with the brush I was using as paint had got down in between the bristles and was starting to make the brush a few sizes thicker than it should have been. I still haven't found a good solution to this yet, I've tried cleaning the brushes well and trimming the splaying bristles off with a razor but the best solution is always to buy a nice new brush with a fine point. I find that flat brushes are best for lines because they hold more paint than a very fine round brush and go in a straight line better. I also had a go at the marble streaks in the tiles which I was a bit uncertain of at first and had to repaint all the tiles to get them smooth enough but as I had to soften the reflections anyway, it seemed worth it.

There were some minor adjustments needed in the coffee pot, the kitchen towel hanging on the wall, the kitchen roll and the table.

I had tried to put a highlight in the top right hand corner of the plate but pure white paint didn't seem to show up. After a bit of staring at the source photo and back at the painting again I decided that although the plate was white, under this lighting it was grey. Darkening the plate automatically made the highlight look more pronounced (I didn't even need to repaint it). There were also other small changes I made to the rest of the food but I can't remember what they all were.

Then came the hands, I was reluctant to touch them because I had painted them in a loose flowing way and I didn't want to lose the expressive quality. However, they did look very pink compared to the face which I had worked on more and the highlights on the veins looked too bright and a bit strange. Nowadays I always use alzarin crimson with a lot of white in my skin tones, usually with burnt sienna and a yellow like yellow ochre or something brighter depending on what is called for by the subject's skin. In this painting my hands were heavily reliant on alzarin crimson and little else so I added burnt sienna mixed with white and raw sienna or yellow ochre, maybe even a little cadmium yellow, and the hands looked much better. I tried to limit the redder bits to my knuckles (which naturally are the reddest parts of my hands, I'm not sure about anyone else).

I faced similar problems with my left hand, but this really was my favourite part of the painting, so I was terrified I was going to ruin it, but I held my breath and pushed ahead. As Del Boy used to say in the 1980s British sitcom Only Fools and Horses "He who dares wins." I believe it is also the motto of the British SAS although I imagine they rarely apply it to portrait painting.

Now this hand is once again my favourite part of the painting, and much better for those final daring dashes of paint.

Spontaneous Composition

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 19:36:00 +0000

From time to time friends ask me to paint a portrait for them, usually of their kids, my answer is always to send me a good photo and I'll do my best. Maybe an artist greater than me could produce wonderful portraits from mediocre photos, but I struggle to turn out something interesting when the source is a boring photograph of person staring into the camera and grinning. Luckily with the advent of digital cameras and cameras in mobile phones, people are snapping away constantly and I frequently get an inspiring photo to paint, and this often results in a painting even better than the source. See the Painting of a Friend´s Kid as an example of one I'm really pleased with. When taking my own photos to paint from I always take hundreds, hoping at least one will give me that special feeling that it will make a good painting. I suppose if I were a better photographer I could be more consistent with the quality of my portrait photos, maybe I should try to find a blog on the subject. As it stands I rely on getting lucky with a nice photo, furthermore I have found that planning a photo shoot often results in stale, tense or contrived images.

The painting which heads this post, of Tatiana by the River Tormes, was from a spontaneous photo we took last summer with the camera in my mobile phone. We were walking by the river near a village called Villa Gonzalo and she started making a crown out of some flowers that were growing along the banks of the river. Castilla y Leon is quite a dry place and there is not an abundance of flowers to choose from, lots of red poppies on wasteland in spring but this was around midsummer and the fields, sporadically populated by stumpy dark evergreen Encina trees, were already turning a sun bleached yellow. The only fresh vegetation and broad-leafed trees to be found were along the river. The shade of the tall trees provided a soothing escape from the intense Salamancan sunshine and the dappled light on Tatiana's face and shoulder inspired me to take out my phone which had a camera built in. I couldn't hope to achieve the quality of images capable with my SLR camera, we had just been planning a picnic, not a photo shoot. However I'm glad I seized the opportunity because when I got home and had a look at the images on my computer I saw that this one perfectly captured Tatiana's delicate poise.

People often claim that painting from life is essential but there are many advantages to working from photos. Here are some of the reasons why I use photos so much:

The light doesn't change. You can paint all day and don't risk losing your initial inspiration by having to paint for an hour a day over a much longer period.
The sitter doesn't move or get tired. They also don't insist on seeing the painting before it's finished, this always kills the magic for me, especially if they start looking disappointed at the half finished result.
The options for composition and background are greater. You can paint an outdoors scene, or a beach scene without having to go to the beach every day.
You can zoom in for the detail. I don't wear glasses and have pretty good eyesight but sometimes it is a strain painting from life if you are sitting too far from a subject to see some vital detail, the exact curve of an upper eyelid or the roundness of a nostril for example. Maybe the detail isn't vital and the ability to see everything microscopically may provide a temptation to paint everything in such a way that you lose the objective view of the image and the painting doesn't have unity or looks overworked.
Spontaneous moments can be captured.

Now we are living in a world where we are all used to seeing photos taken from every angle, in every possible location. The traditional portrait of a figure sat looking out from a canvas looks stale and lifeless to us now, we have been spoilt by the profusion of images caught on digital cameras, smartphones or posted on social networks such as Facebook or Google+. I think we should take advantage of these new developments, not keep claiming that there is some sort of magic when painting a person sat in front of us. Artists in the past got very good at painting from life, if you go to any national gallery such as the British National Gallery in London or the Prado in Madrid you can see portraits of royals and important people of times gone by which would be hard to beat with regards to technique and realism. As new paints were developed people started using paint in different ways, the impressionists for example had access to the innovation of oil paint in tubes and began to use paint in thick buttery impasto which held expressive brushstrokes. They became more mobile and no longer tied to studios were able to paint outdoors to achieve their impressions of light and shade.

Even this exciting exuberance soon began to lose its novelty and in the 20th century painting went through a difficult time. Artists didn't know where to go next so they got ugly. There was some photorealism which I quite like but there is also a lot of abstract and aggressive art which often fails to strike a chord in me. Jackson Pollock became fashionable when his drip paintings seemed new but he couldn't develop the idea any further and such art is easy to copy, he must have felt despair when he found no direction to go but back. When I stand in front of abstract, expressionist or even naive paintings I often feel like the little boy in the story of The Emperor's New Clothes who could see that it was all a trick and I wonder whether the artist was fooling himself as well, putting a lot of imaginary emotion into each meaningless brushstroke. But all this was just a failure to find anything new to do in painting, a feeling that everything had been done already.

Although it might not seem like it, now we do have new vistas to explore in painting. With digital photos and even more developments in modern paints there are things we can paint in ways impossible in the past, with techniques and a quality very difficult to obtain before now. Maybe we should stop trying to be original and just concentrate on being good and then maybe we can take painting to a whole new level of beauty.

Two heads are better than one?

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 11:49:00 +0000

I just finished this double portrait for a friend of my brother, a commission of sorts. I thought I would post a blog entry reflecting on some of the things to consider when accepting commissions for portrait paintings.

I am quite a fast painter, some portraits I manage to turn out in a weekend or just an afternoon if there are no complications and it is just a head to paint. My brother asked me if I would paint two children of a friend of his and I said no problem, imagining that it would be done in a week. The photo he sent me looked quite nice, with light coming from behind the subjects, a challenge I thought! This would be interesting. In the background there were some beach umbrellas which looked a bit messy so I decided straight away to just paint the deck chair they were sitting on and a bright sandy yellow streaming from behind them.

I got started and painted in the main shapes, I could imagine how it was going to turn out and I was fired up with the prospect of exciting backlit faces. Then I went on holiday for Easter along the Mediterranean Coast and my enthusiasm for this double portrait wanned, I began thinking about lots of other new paintings I could do. By the time I got back to my easle it seemed less of an exciting project and more of a chore I just had to finish before i could paint anything else. I began painting and did a little detail on their legs and had a rest, then some detail on their shirts and had a rest, then some detail on their hands and had another rest. Then I left it for a week and painted nothing, over the next month or so I fiddled and procrastinated and I began to realise that although it may only take me an afternoon to paint a face with loosely suggested hair, it takes me considerably longer to paint two faces, hair, clothes, full length bodies, toes and fingers, and on top of this, complicated backlit faces!

Part of the problem with a double portrait is that you cannot rely on each face looking real in relation to the colours of the clothes and background, it must also harmonise with the tones in the face of the second subject. I have painted a few portraits where one child looks too pale in relation to their sibling, if they had been independent paintings then they would have been self-contained and balanced, but because their heads are right next to each other one looks like they have been out in the sun longer than the other. There is also the risk of getting lucky with one head and not with the other, when the muse descends and you catch the expression on one face perfectly with grace and ease, but then the muse goes off for a tea break and you are left struggling and over painting the second face and you begin wishing the first one didn't looks so good because the contrast really shows how badly you painted the second. I find it's best to jump between the subjects, using the same palette but paying attention to the variation in tonal values. In this painting it was quite difficult to capture the different shades on the kids' legs, the light was different on each one and I had to rely on just painting what I could see to try to get it looking real.

To conclude, when accepting portrait comissions you should take into account how much of the figures the client is expecting to be painted, it can be nice to include hands in a three-quarter-view portrait but even hands can really complicate things. Also, for the reasons I have mentioned, two subjects in one painting is a much more complex task than two paintings of individual subjects. If you are not a very experienced portrait painter then maybe it's better to avoid painting group portraits and save yourself some frustration and time.

BP Portrait Award

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 18:09:00 +0000

So this year I entered the 2012 BP Portrait Award, I have visited the exhibition of finalists in the National Portrait Gallery a few times and have always been impressed by the talent on show. I had been meaning to have a go myself for the last few years and finally got around to it this year. Although I had no illusions as to winning, I thought I might get in the top 50, I mean, how many portrait painters can there really be out there? The logistics of entering were a bit complicated, I had to leave the painting with my parents in London while I was visiting them and my dad kindly took the painting along to one of the submission days. What with the entry fee and the price for the framing of the piece coming to just under a hundred pounds it wasn’t cheap on my measly teacher’s wage, I liked the portrait and although it was simple and had no background I was feeling lucky. It is of a student of mine here in Salamanca, Juan Blanco Blanco, a guy I respect not only for being a spine surgeon and researcher into non-embryonic stem cells, but also for being a person of strong religious faith in these secular times.

It turned out that there are far more than 50 portrait painters interested in having their work on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery, and no, I didn’t get picked. The rejection letter goes as follows:

Dear BP Portrait Award 2012 Entrant

Thank you very much for entering this year's competition. The judges have now made their final decision and I am afraid that on this occasion your entry was not selected for exhibition. This year there were approximately 2,200 entries and only 55 were selected for exhibition, including the four shortlisted for prizes, so the competition was very strong. We wish you the very best with your continued practice and hope that you will consider applying to the competition again in the future.

So my dad had to go back into central London to pick the painting up, and I was left contemplating why mine wasn’t good enough, and whether I should give up on entering competitions completely and save my money. Upon reflection and after having looked at the BP Portrait Award website I have come to the conclusion that I should have tried harder, maybe painted some more of the body, and included a luscious background to boot. I won’t give up yet, but 2,200 entries is a lot to beat and I shouldn’t be so complacent next time. At least I can reuse the frame…

A Tribute to Lucian Freud

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 19:50:00 +0000

I painted this self-portrait last year upon hearing the news about the death of Lucian Freud. I was a big fan of his, especially as he was a figurative painter who was working successfully through a period where abstract art was dominating the world. I painted this without doing a comprehensive review of his work, mostly because I didn't want to end up copying his style too much. I remembered the self-portrait of himself wearing boots and standing naked with some brushes and a palette and the general feeling my memories gave me were of paintings in electric light, maybe a bit gloomy or disturbing in some way.

I decided to paint myself in a similar pose, not naked as I'm not quite ready for that, and lit with a combination of an electric light above my head and daylight coming from my kitchen behind me, and to my left the living room. I am in fact painting this in the bathroom mirror, not big enough to get my whole body in. I remembered Freud's paintings as seeming quite yellow and in retrospect I can see that on the contrary a lot of his portraits contain very fleshy skin tones, I however followed the impression his paintings had left on me and painted my skin tones with yellows, greens and the occasional pink and violets. As with most painting I left it unfinished, it took over a week (nothing compared to Freud's six months or more) and I was already getting bored of it. In the bottom left of the painting you can see how I have left a pack of mineral water bottles unfinished and my trousers are just suggested with a flat wash of black.

Wide Angles

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 17:56:00 +0000

At the beginning of last year I decided that what I really needed to improve my paintings of cities was a wide angle camera lens. I had seen some paintings in which scenes of an urban nature were bent and distorted as if painted from photos taken through a fish-eye lense or as seen in a convex mirror. This seemed to really suit the nature of the subject: tall buildings loomed and long roads bent around the picture fitting in lots of interesting details. I got myself the cheapest wide angle lens I could find and went off around Salamanca taking photos of plazas and churches, monastaries and parks. As with so many things in life it wasn't quite as easy as it seemed as the distortion I was so much craving was just too much, if I tilted the camera too high the trees and buildings fell away in a very unreal manner. I got home and uploaded the photos onto my computer to find that many of them weren't suitable for painting, as I have often found when painting spectacular sunsets, if a photo doesn't look real then a painting of it certainly won't. As the year passed I found that I used the wide angle lens less and less, usually opting for the one I got with the camera. In fact the function for taking 360 degree photos on my smart phone seems to achieve results more like what I was imagining in the beginning than this expensive camera lens

Anyway, of the photos I took I did do a couple of paintings, here is one of a church, the Iglesia de San Martin behind la Plaza Major. I had the presence of mind to take photos of the painting process and here it is, step by step. If you want to see the photos in more detail then click on the image and it will bring them up full size.

After I finished this painting I kept it for a while and then eventually painted over it with something else, to be honest I'm not sure which painting I convered it with, maybe one day my work will become collectable and an art museum will x-ray each painting to find half a dozen other paintings under each one. It's not that I disliked the painting but it was rather big and I could see an even better painting waiting to take its place on the canvas. I paint as a hobby so I see each painting more as an opportunity to learn than something that will make me money, and my walls are already too full with my favourite paintings to fit any more. My collection is a brutal example of natural selection, if I like something I have painted then it goes on the wall, but it has to be better than what is already there to replace something. If there is no space for it then it sits on one of my easles until it is dry and then gets put in a pile of paintings in a corner or, if it's really bad and may be embarrassing if seen by a visitor it gets put in a cupboard. If I don't have any blank canvases to paint on when I get the idea for a new painting then I just grab my least favourite in the pile and paint over that. And so happened with this painting, now it only exists in digital form. And so natural selection picks off the weak paintings and leaves my collection stronger.

I began with a yellowish undercoat, as usual I was using some old paint left over from another painting so the yellow went on in an uneven manner as I mixed it with more white and then more yellow. As the strange wide angle was important I took time to get the lines of the building and the pavings an the floor at correct angles.

I approach the addition of detail differently in each painting, in this case I added all the shadows and dark lines first over the underpainting to preserve the pencil drawing underneath the undercoat.

Here I am adjusting the colour of the sky so that it doesn't look so muddy and I can get the rest of the colours correct in relation to it.

Next the lightest points on the painting went in. I think I made the church too white and this was a reason for me eventually painting over this. In fact most of the stone in the historical centre of Salamanca is a beautiful yellow somewhere between naples yellow and yellow ocre.

I keep adding blocks of colour, here the bottom of the church is being painted in.

As the painting begins to take shape I have to adjust some of the yellow underpainting as it was beginning to look harsh in relation to the rest of the tones.

I keep working to get everything balanced.

Here I've painted the pavings a more accurate tone. Click on the image to get a better idea of what is changing.

In this photo I am getting rid of more of the underpainting, filling in between the gaps.

Here is a close up of me adding some detail, I like to use a brush bigger than I think I can handle and then the final result looks less over-worked.

The finished painting, as seen on the easle.

As usual I try to take a photo where there is no light reflected on the painting, then I crop the photo on a photo editor and sometimes adjust the levels if the light I have taken the photo in is too yellow. I always try to get it looking the same as in real life, sometimes it can be nice to up the contrast a bit, but it's easy to go to far and lose some of the subtlety of the actual artwork.

Backgrounds and Clothing

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 18:00:00 +0000

When painting a portrait I am always confronted with the question of how much background to put it, whether to keep the focus on the face and just suggest the subject's clothing and hair or to pull out all the stops and put detail in across the painting. The background question is often dictated by the quality of the background in any source photo I might be using, sometimes it seems unsuitable for a portrait, or looks like it may distract from the main focus of the painting, and I end up just filling the background with one colour. This choice of colour varies from painting to painting, I might try meditating on a colour wheel for a while to pick a contrasting colour, or alternatively choose something that is already in the painting in order to highlight it. Sometimes I just pick a pleasant light tone such as a light green or blue, if it doesn't work then you can always paint over it, occasionally I end up trying various colours before settling on one.

In the case of the painting at the top of this post, All Hair and Elbows, the background in the photo was quite dark and a bit gloomy, a yellow-brown. The grey I've used looks somewhat similar but a bit lighter and with the colour neutralized it makes the figure stand out more. I also chose to show some brush strokes, I usually prefer to do this rather than paint everything in a flat plane of colour (as I did in the painting of my brother which can be found in the Family Portraits post) but this is a personal preference.

Flat planes can be very pleasing especially when painting with acrylics (as they tend to flatten upon drying anyway). If you do the whole painting like this then it has a cut-out paper effect or something which looks like it has been done on Photoshop using a filter. I do quite like this style but if everyone is just using Photoshop and printing onto canvas with a giclée printer then I'd prefer to do something which doesn't look like it can be achieved so easily. One of the beauties of paint is the texture and the possibilities of expression it has in every brushstroke. Although I am not a particularly expressive artist, mainly because I can't really evaluate or appreciate my own paintings when they are too abstract, the human imprint on a painting is something which my soul delights in. I would like all my brushstrokes to be unlaboured and harmonious like movements in a dance and yet in conjunction to provide a window to a moment that is authentic and real. I am always improving and working towards this ideal but usually fall short on both of these points to varying degrees, I suppose that is what keeps me painting: the desire to do it better next time.

Some painters choose to do a graduation of colour from dark to light in the background, maybe I'll try this one of these days but until now I seem to have unintentionally avoided this, either prefering to put in one tone or suggest the background as I did in Worried Maybe in the Creating a Scene post. I seldom paint everything in great detail behind the subject although I think this might be a good idea as I've seen a lot of portraits by professional artists where they do this, although in these cases the background is usually relevant or reveals something about the subject's character or profession.

The same question applies when approaching the detail in the clothing of the subject, whether to go to great lengths to describe every fold and crease of their attire or just suggest it with a few loose brushstrokes. In my experience I've found that although it can be nice to focus attention on the face and maybe hands with more detail than the clothing, a big difference can make it look unbalanced or like I got bored or ran out of energy (as is often the case). Some artists of the past and present graduate the detail so that it becomes more hazy as it moves towards the edges of the painting, I've tried this but usually end up finishing it off otherwise it looks too much like a sketch.

In the painting which heads the post I meticulously painted all the little rings in the dress, each one has a slightly different tone and shape and the result is a 3D effect on the arms and chest. I could have worked on it a bit more but I found myself going a little crazy staring at each circle and pondering how different it looked from its neighbours. It took about three passes over the painting to reach this point, the first to get the shape and colour and and then two more to get everything the correct tone relative to everything else so that it didn't look flat. It's always possible to keep working on a painting, getting it closer and closer to what is in the source photo, but you always have to stop somewhere, sometimes you feel that it looks finished or that any more work you put in will get you no better a result or sometimes you just feel bored and burnt out.

The best feeling is when you are pleasantly surprised at what you've achieved: the painting is better than you pictured in your head when you started out, you've taken the image in the photo to a whole new level by rendering it in paint, and you are afraid to touch it because you have no idea how you got it to this point, as if something magical had just happened when you were lost in concentration and the folds of a dress.

Painting Rainy Streets

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 19:00:00 +0000

Here in Salamanca it almost never rains, I suppose I should be grateful. After painting a few cityscapes of the buildings of in the typical yellow sandstone called Villamayor illuminated by a bright blue sky I began to realise that yellow on blue can get boring sometimes. Instead of waiting for a day with nice weather to go out and take source photos I began to get my camera out on gloomy days. One great advantage of rainy days is that the light from the sky is reflected up off the ground, even if it is gloomy grey or white light, the result is that light is coming from everywhere and the ground becomes a mirror for the rest of the painting. I had been looking at some paintings by Ken Howard and was extremely impressed by his depiction of wet city streets, it caught my eye how much green he used in the reflections. When I looked at some photos I had taken of Salamanca in the rain I noticed that there was also a lot of green in the reflections, even though there weren't any trees or anything green in the images. I decided to have a go and did this oil painting of Calle Toro, I never finished it and it's a few years old now, despite this it is still by far my most popular painting on Flickr.com, with over 1500 views! I had intended to to more on it but got distracted by another painting and when I went back to this painting couldn't muster the energy to get into it again.

I followed the same theme of rainy streets by taking some photos of the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square when visiting my parents one Christmas in London. In this one it is almost dark and so it is the floodlights on the facade that are reflected by the wet pavement.

Another key to both of these paintings is the people milling about in the streets, cityscapes without people tend to look spooky, no matter how nice the buildings are. In the painting of the National Gallery they are little more than silhouettes, in the Calle Toro painting they are a bit more elaborate but still just blobs of colour, well worth putting in though. I never wait for people to get out of the way when I am taking a photo to paint in a city, always mindful of the added value these strangers may give to my paintings.

White isn't Always White - Painting Colours

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 16:33:00 +0000

There is much more to painting colour than painting the colour of the object in front of you. In order to illustrate some of the factors to be considered I am going to write about painting white and how it can be altered in different ways in different contexts.

Firstly the colour of the subject will be under the influence of the light cast on it, not only from the principal lightsource but also the light reflected off other coloured surfaces around it. In this painting above there were two sources of light, the electric light of the bathroom and also the cold daylight coming from the kitchen behind.

Next the colour of the light seen on the object will depend on the type of surface the object has. In the painting the surface of the tiles to the right were very reflective so darks and lights were accentuated, the electric light was slightly yellow and somewhat blocked by the door, the door was also had a gloss finish but as it has been a few year since it has been painted this is not the brilliant white it used to be, this added to the tiles having a yellow tone.

Another thing which affects the colour of something being painted is the context which it is put in. The white of the shirt in this painting looks so white because it is next to whites that look blue or yellow. In the same way something dark will look darker if positioned next to something bright. It is a good idea to approach a painting by first establishing on the canvas the darkest and lightest points on the painting, followed by the principal tones. If you don't then a colour you put down earlier may look different when you start adding other colours and you might have to go back to repaint what you've already done.

A good general rule is to try to paint what you see rather than what you think is there, but you also have to take into account how the colours will be interpreted differently by your eye according to the colours around them. Don't be dissapointed if you think you've got just the right colour for an object and then have to make adjustments later as the painting develops, for this reason it's usually better not to paint any particular part of a painting in too much detail before you have the other elements at least roughly suggested on the canvas. The painting should evolve as a whole, your paintbrush jumping back and forth between areas as they develop in contrast to each other.

Self Portraits

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 20:27:00 +0000

Self portraits are a real treat to paint. Often when painting a portrait for someone else I can get worried about whether they will think it looks like themselves, or whether it is flattering enough. This preoccupation can restrict my expression and sometimes make the painting look over done or too much like a photograph, or just a bit stale. When painting myself I am not so worried about getting the features right and I feel more free to experiment with the style. The oil painting which heads this article is the most recent in the post, there are others in the blog which are more recent, such as the one of myself drinking water, but even this is about a year old. I painted this worried looking one from a photo of myself sat in the shade in front of a yellow wall, this has resulted in all the tones in my skin not being overpowered by direct sunlight, and the reflections all being true to how they would be for a person in front of a yellow background. Sometimes I do a portrait and then pick a background colour of my choice, this always runs the risk of making the face jump out of the painting, not quite harmonizing with its surroundings, sometimes this can be a good effect, other times it just looks wrong. I also painted this portrait of myself over another painting which had quite thick paint so there was no chance of trying to get any detail in as the surface was so rough, although you don't really notice this as the painting is quite large (61x80cm). I am looking worried because I thought it might be more interesting than one of me grinning at the viewer.

One of the oldest self portrait I currently have in my possession is this one on the right of me on my balcony, it is painted in acrylics and to be honest I've improved quite a bit simce then, although I still like this painting. The light is streaming over my shoulder and loses the shape of my head. I had my hair quite short but not bald as it might appear in the photo. Again a pensive look, trying to look thoughtful I suppose. I remember I painted my finger far too long at first and didn't notice until a friend pointed it our to me.

Acrylics have their own charm and I used to use them a lot, they are great because they dry so quickly and you can put layer on top of layer without waiting for one to dry. If you want to build up tones with semi-transparent glazes of colour then this can add a nice richness to the painting, especially if using a medium instead of just water. The painting in the last post of the coffee pot with cherries is done in this way and looks quite good I think.

When painting in acrylics I often found myself trying to get it to look like an oil painting, with thick paint and visible brush strokes. You can buy mediums which slow the drying of the acrylic paint so that you can paint wet-in-wet on the canvas, and also some acrylic lines claim to be able to produce impasto effects and hold the impression of the brush stroke. Certainly the ones I tried about six years ago didn't seem to be able to achieve this, and as with normal acrylic paint the surface would flatten as it dried, maybe the products are better now. I tried in oils and saw astounded at how perfect thick paint retains impressions, especially if it is a little dry. I haven't really gone back to acrylics, except for underpainting, although I would certainly deny this is a permanent switch. Here, on the left you can see another self portrait, this time in oils, using thick impasto. I painted it quickly and the photo was actually taken almost in the dark, at the opening of an exhibition in an art gallery, in front of a projector, hence the strong shadows.

Finally, the last painting was another experiment. I had taken a lot of photos of myself shaving in a mirror and did a series of painting from them. The intention had been to capture the steam on the mirror but as it was summer and there was no condensation on the glass, and the other paintings in this series look a bit ameteurish. This one was an accident of composition as I wasn't quite sure where I was pointing the camera. I liked the look of it in the photo so painted it along with the others and among the lot it remains my favourite and the only one I haven't painted over (yet). The background was invented and my hair and eyebrow are darker than they are in real life (as a friend pointed out). But that's the joy of self portraits, the extra licence to experiment because it's your own face you are painting. Certainly it's a great way to practice and improve, some people are shocked at the number of paintings of myself I have when they visit me at my flat, and I get accused of being egotistical. Well, perhaps I am, but that is an other issue.

Painting from Life or Photos

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 21:01:00 +0000

In this photo I am going to write about some of my experiences painting still life paintings from life and from photos. I read a lot about how painting from life, with the subject physically in front of you, is the best way to learn and sometimes feel ashamed that I paint so much from photos. I work a lot from digital photos on my computer and often get up on a Saturday morning and indulge in a whole weekend's painting, until late Sunday evening. Sometimes I work for up to two weeks on a photo as I did with this acrylic painting of a coffee pot pictured above, which I painted years ago now, or the more recent one of me drinking from a glass of water a few posts back. I must admit that two weeks staring at the same photo and I start to go a little stir crazy, a weekend is nice and with a photo it's great that the light doesn't change and you can rotate the canvas upside--down to get a fresh look at it.

Sometimes while painting from photos it can be tempting to get bogged down in detail and spend a lot of time labouring over the shape of a blob of colour on the screen. When I do it I seem to be under the impression that i need only concentrate hard on the photo it will work out well. I am often disallusioned when I spend ages on a painting, copying everything in as much detail as I can, and the resulting picture lacks life or even realism. There is a hauting and unattractive clarity to how they were produced, as if by numbers. Sometimes they work, and seem to click, at least to me, into the real world, better than the photo was, and bigger.

If you paint looser you can chose along a gradient of how expressive or abstract you want the result, from photorealism you slip into impressionism, into expressionism and then abstractions. In each type however you have the chance of looking obvious or cliquéd, but depending on your tastes, you may to chose to prefer that style.

Bad impressionism is better than bad photorealism to many people. At least it doesn't have a fake, wrong look, like a badly copied photograph. An impression in expressive paint is often easier and less time consuming to a very realistic look, and the result can have somehow captured as much realism, made that magic step up into looking like the real thing, and not being blocked by flawed attempts to capture reality.

By the time you've got to abstractions and lost any connection to any visual reality, then you need to connect on some other level, emotional, intelectual, or worse, shocking level. At his point painting somewhat loses its interest to me, maybe I can connect on an emotional level, but it won't enspire emotion not like a well painted impression of a real thing. I don't know why I probably wouldn't sit looking at a lemon, but in a painting I might. It may inspire me, perhaps because I want to reproduce it, maybe I'm just thinking how I can adopt some of its techniques, wondering how this person is so much better than me. But why does it give me such pleasure to leave it on the wall? Good paintings seem to radiate energy, a hope in the human abilities to conquer reality, not only visully but emotionally. To look like the real thing on more than just one level, to capture the moment, the feeling being there.

So the question is whether painting from a photograph impedes the ability to capture the moment. Maybe being in front of an object helps you get this connection which a photo never could. Maybe it can. You probably need to be a better paintier than me, for me, the advantages of time outweigh any other factor in getting a photo looking magical. The colours of a photograph are not as good as the real thing, also seeing with two eyes has an effect because you decide which perspective you want to get on the picture. Maybe a blend of the two eyes can help create this elusive realism. Last month I painted a still life of a bowl with some lemons and mandarins, after a week one of the lemons was turning green. Admittedly I had only done half and hour a few nights that week, maybe if I had shuttered the window and spent a whole weekend painting with an electric light I would have got something more better than I could obtain from multiple sittings, as it always takes a while to get into the flow of observing and painting each time you sit dowm. Maybe with a litttle practice I'll get betterand be able to capture everything in less time, with fewer but more accurate brush strokes, and less mistakes with colour mixing mistakes. I'll keep practising.

However if you paint from a photo you needn't be so loyal to the image. You can always try to paint in a more relaxed fashion if the style of the painting demands it. I quite enjoy trying to make a painting look photorealistic, but I equally get satisfaction from letting loose, as in this oil painting on the right which I did of some daisies from a photo last year. My intention had been to do a light, airy painting as as the subject was a bunch of flowers I felt I could hardly go wrong, as long as I got the impression of the light and the basic shapes and colours right. I painted it over an evening and the next day, the light didn't change in the image, I kept it loose and was not restricted by painting it from a photo.

I am sure that if you practice with either source, you will get better at interpreting that kind of source, either photos or real life. You will get better at using the advantages and reducing the restrictions of either way of painting. I am quite good at working from photos so I am going to practise more from life, any sort of practice gives you more insight into how to capture that real freeling.

I will leave you with another painting I did from life, this time in one sitting, it took me about an afternoon. I did it a few years ago and in acrylic so the paint dried quickly so there was no problems with the dark outline of the bannana polluting the green or yellow. It is actually very large so I didn't have to do any fiddling abround with small brushes and it ran quite pleasingly. I painted it over another painting so I wasn't just painting over white.

Revisiting Unfinished Paintings

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 17:35:00 +0000

I am often reluctant to go back to unfinished, or almost finished paintings. When my artwork is nearing completion and I am pleased with it I begin to worry that something I will do is going to ruin what I've managed to capture. Not all my paintings turn out well and the difference between getting a painting looking ok and looking great is often a stroke of luck, some days it's as if the muse is with me and sothing magical happens, other days I seem to be just following steps and the painting ends up looking artificial, over-worked or contrived. Hence I begin to get a bit edgy when adding the finishing touches and sometimes rather leave a painting slightly unfinished than go over the top.

If after a few months I'm still not quite pleased with a painting I usually paint over it, it gives me great satisfaction to eradicate my failings and have another go at a completely different subject. Sometimes the previous painting acts as an underpainting and adds some impossible-to-plan interest to the new work. Quite a few of the paintings I have already posted on this blog have faced this end, even the one of the close up of my eye in the blog entitled A Painting of a Friend's Kid, which I turned into a much better painting of Tatiana at the Bathroom Door, which I have yet to include in a post.

Some paintings however I regain inspiration for and have a go at finishing off or improving in some way. The still-life which heads this blog is one example, it was a whole year before I went back to it to add the detail in the glass and background, although I did quite like it as it was when it was only half finished. It is acrylic on canvas, back when I used to do most of my paintings in acrylics. Another example is the portrait to the right, of my friend and student Carlos. In this case I just couldn't get my first attempt at painting him right, it looked awful and I had intended to give it to him as a gift. I just had to give up and go back to it a few months later. Now I am quite pleased with the re-touched result and it is now hanging on his wall.

I have read that other artists leave their paintings a while to assess with more objectivity the result of their labours. I would never touch a painting that I am already pleased with though, I am not confident enough yet that I wouldn't mess it up. If I'm just going to paint over it though then what is there to lose, just a little more time and a bit more paint.

Not So Still Life: Running Water

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 14:49:00 +0000

One of my favourite things to paint are the reflections and refractions in water. Similar to reflections on shiny metal surfaces such as stainless steel or chrome, apparently abtract forms are suddenly brought to life when carefully copied from a still life composition into paint. While it may be difficult to capture the peel of a lemon or the delicate beauty or a flower petal, the human eye easily recognises water as water, no matter how inaccurate the shapes within it look, a lemon may turn out lumpy, but strange bends and distortions in water are just taken for granted.

A few years ago I had been itching to paint running water but my camera just wasn't good enough to capture the fast movement as a still shot, it kept compensating for lack of light by holding the shutter open longer than I wanted and the flow of water would result in a blurred column. I enlisted the help of a friend who owned an SLR camers and managed to get a few good images to work from over the following months, one of them being the self-portrait above of me spilling a glass of water down my chin, and the other of hands catching water to the right.

As you may be able to see, the hardest part of both of the paintings was the human skin surrounding the flowing water. I seem to have been able to capture the hand a bit better in the self-portrait, I could probably have tried a bit harder in the other painting but I was getting bored after meticulously copying the cascade of bouncing water, which contained so many little abstract shapes which I wanted to get right to give the overall impression a realistic look, that I had had enough by the time I got to the hands. The tap and the plug (yes, it's a black plug wound around the tap) were the easiest to capture, as long as the outline of the handles and spout were correct I couldn't really go wrong with the reflections themselves.

The self portrait is actually a much bigger painting than the one of the tap and I was using a small brush for the reflections and the hands. For some reason I kept using this small brush as I began working on the face, although I would normally use a larger brush to cover bigger surfaces. This has resulted in the face having a patchy, cross-hatched look which I ended up leaving as I quite liked it, and more importantly I didn't want to ruin. Sometimes at the end of a painting I get worried about messing it up and will leave a painting slightly unfinished for fear of losing the effect I have managed to achieve.

I eventually got my own SLR camera and took some photos of a glass overflowing with water in my kitchen, for some reason I don't like this painting as much, maybe it's the composition or lack of colours, certainly the skin on the hands looks a little wrong, but here it is anyway:

Creating a Scene

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 20:32:00 +0000

It has become evident to me that painting portraits of people grinning at the viewer has limited emotional depth so I have been trying more and more to include some aspect of tension or drama in the scenes I paint. I hope to to this more and am currently brainstorming ideas, maybe I will try ro reproduce some scenes from films or at least ideas which imply some storyline behind the painting.

This painting of my friend Tatiana I called Worried Maybe, it is from a photo of her sitting in my living room, she was looking off to one side pensively and I was snapping away with my camera, who knows maybe it should be called Bored and Getting Annoyed Maybe. Anyway, I really like the result, I didn't work too hard on getting it looking like her but rather tried to capture some element of emotion.

Another painting I did a while back which also has some tension is one of two friends doing some late night cooking, an Italian guy and a Spanish girl I know, the guy was actually a bit tired of me taking so many photos but in the painting he just looks sinister, it could be from a movie. I intend to do more like this.

A Painting of a Friend's Kid

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Sun, 08 May 2011 20:25:00 +0000

I started this painting on Friday afternoon, did the bulk of it on Saturday morning and finished it on Sunday morning. I have been thinking recently about a comment someone put on one of my flickr posts. This guy said that I needed to work on my definition, I supposed by this that he meant putting in fine detail. He had a point, a lot of the time when painting large I would stick to large brushes, on the occasions when I did end up using fine brushes it would be because I was putting in fine detail over the whole painting, like in the self portrait of me drinking water. In a lot of the the large paintings such as the banana still life or the other self portrait of myself looking worried on a yellow background, I tried to keep to large brushes while putting in the detail, I'm not sure why, I think because on a big painting I want to avoid getting bogged down in detail so I try to get the detail in with sides of brushes or by painting into thick lines to make them thinner. So I vowed to try painting something with more definition, the plan would be to paint something quite loosely with large brushes, and then add just a bit of precise detail with a fine brush.

The first painting I did to try this out was the close up of my eye. I figured that I needed some contrasts in the painting to accentuate the detail so I was looking for a source photo that had interesting detail in one part and the rest out of focus. I achieved this by taking a close-up photo of my head with the camera set to a low aperture, I don't know much about cameras but this shallow depth of field basically makes everything blurred except the thing in focus (which isn't saying much). I took quite a lot of photos and this was the one that seemed most promising. I usually pick source images looking at the photos as thumbnails to see which ones seem to have a harmonious composition, I dried reading books about composition but paintings can look artificial if you build them around lines, diagonals and rules, nowadays I try to rely on instinct, if the photo looks good it's probably got a good composition.

The eye turned out quite well I think, I emphasised all the colours and contrasts, maybe I've made all the pores on my nose look like blackheads and the freckles on my nose are never that visible, and the hairs of my eyebrows a bit black but it achieves the desired effect. It looks loose enough to be expressive and yet with enough detail to bring it that real look. I was quite pleased and a few days later painted the one of my friend's kid, the same method applied: block in all the colours with big brushes and expressive strokes and then add detail with a fine brush. The source photo jumped out at me because of the interesting colours and perspective although I had to change the background, which was some concrete steps. The colour of the goggles seemed appropriate for the background as it looks like water, it is viridian with a bit of ultramarine and white. On the left side of the painting you can see the blue of the painting I was painting over, one of the Dominican Monastery in Salamanca (you can still see it on flickr).

Time-Lapse Video

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 15:01:00 +0000

Upon re-reading my previous post I thought I'd add that when painting at night it is important to use enough light so as not to strain your eyes, and although you shouldn't use lack of ventilation as an excuse not to paint with oils, also don't make yourself sick. I paint with oil paint and white spirit in a relatively small flat and if I'm mixing with a lot of white spirit the room where I'm painting can get quite full of fumes but then I go away and do some washing up or something, or open a window if it isn't too cold outside, I don't get headaches maybe you will. Use some common sense, but forget the excuses.

I've been experimenting with making time-lapse photography. While downloading photos from my camera I noticed an option for controlling the camera from the computer, after a bit of playing about I worked out how to get the camera to take a photo every ten seconds. A week later and after my first go at using Windows Movie Maker I've edited together a time-lapse movie of me painting my friend Samanta from a photo she took with a web cam. I was covering another painting so before I started did the underdrawing and then used some left over magenta and white (it might have had some other colours in it too) to hide the previous painting and most of the pencil.

As an illustration of my previous post, in the video you can see how I have a yellowish 9W compact fluorescent off camera to the left. There is also a more powerful 20W white light off camera to the right which is bouncing light off the walls. The finished painting photo was taken with the white lamp directly above it.

The Importance of Using the Right Equipment

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 09:18:00 +0000

Now, I bet that you think I'm going to say that using the right equipment is of utmost importance, well you'd be wrong. This post could just as well be titled "The Importance of the Having the Right Painting Environment/Natural Light/Ventilation". All of them are great excuses for not painting. I knew an art student who said that she couldn't understand how I painted in my flat, sat in front of my computer most of the time with tubes of paint hiding behind the keyboard and under the monitor. She needed a big light room with a big table to put her paints and brushes and immaculately organised mixing palette with the colours always in the same order. She found it difficult getting access to such a studio so hadn't painted since she left university. Sad really.

Excuses, excuses. I mix paints in the bottoms of cut up fizzy drinks bottles or on the polystyrene trays you get food on in the supermarket. This way I can have one mini palette for dark colours, one for whites, maybe a skin tones one or a green one, depending on the painting. They fit easily in the palm if you're standing up or can be propped on the edge of the messiest table. They are also useful because I can squirt white spirit in (I use the cheapest supermarket turps I can find, not the expensive artist's stuff) and have five little wells of colour with a mixing area in the middle.

Now, the point of me writing all this is not to advise you to adopt my "PalmPalette", in fact, sometimes they are annoyingly small and can easily become chaotic (but who cares? grab a new one!). I also have a few traditional palletes (which are so completely covered in paint on both sides that they are about an inch thick and weigh about 2 kilos each) , and I have used the type of pallette which utilize tear-off sheets of greaseproof paper (both comercial and homemade), which are great for oils and absolutely indispensable for acrylic painting if you want to keep your paints from drying (you have to put moist tissue underneath the greaseproof paper). Any of these options is acceptable (for oils at least), I've heard of professional artists who use glass tables to mix paint on, every night they scrape them clean ready for the next day, and wouldn't that be lovely in an ideal world, but I for one am too lazy and would rather see a dollop of paint dry and harden over a few weeks than throw it in the bin on a tissue every night. Try to avoid muddy colours, put colours with similar colours on the palette so that you don't accidentally get some black in your yellow or blue in your orange. I often use various dollops of white, each dedicated to a certain colour for mixing: one next to the blues, another for the skin tones. But the shape of your palette is not going to have much of a detrimental effect on your painting , forget about all this pre-preparation, do it if it comes naturally but try to concentrate on the colours in the painting when choosing what you're putting on the palette. For me, the palette should be dictated by the painting, not visa versa.

The point of me writing all this is to say that painting should be the most important thing, if you are being prevented from painting because you think you need everything laid out like a surgeon's scalpel trolley then you need to realize that your are procrastinating, everything needn't be perfect. Just relax a bit and get started, you'll enjoy it when you get going.

The same goes for using bad lighting as an excuse. Ok, you need good light to take photos (especially of your paintings), and you will need good light if you plan to paint from life, but I paint late into the night using supermarket brand low energy light bulbs and my painting seem to turn out ok. I have various lamps of varying power and hues scattered about my study, I use them alone or in combination depending on my necessity at that moment. Most of the time when I'm just relaxing and painting at night (or on dark winter evenings) I prefer to use my 9W desk lamp which has a warm tone, if I need more power or a more careful assessment of the colours in a painting I switch on one of two 20W lamps which are portable and can be hooked onto shelving, depending on where I want the shadows to fall (or not fall). Although probably not true daylight bulbs they cover more of the spectrum than the warm yellow variety and are better for judging colours on a painting. I only use them when necessary because they are very bright and make me feel that I am painting in a bathroom or kitchen, working rather than relaxing.

It is important to note that these bulbs are low energy (of the compact fluorescent type) and so the light they produce per watt is much more than an old tungsten bulbs, the 9W behaving like a 40W incandescent lamp; and the 20W somewhere around a 100W of the old type. This also has the added advantage that I am able to put a powerful 100W equivalent in a flimsy but portable light fitting only rated for a 40W bulb. It isn't a professional studio lighting system (during the holidays I sometimes work back in England for a friend who is a professional lighting engineer and we put floodlights on schools and do interiors of churches and the occasional art gallery, a genius of light and electricity and a conscientious craftsman, Nick Bove of Nico Electrics (don't contact him, he doesn't need and more work)), but the set up I have good enough for my painting and costs next to nothing.

It is always better to paint in daylight if you can but as the light fails you needn't worry so much about the dangers of artificial lighting influencing your ability to assess the colours in a painting, you might be painting relative to the colours already put down in the daytime in which case you probably won't stray off into strange hues as long as you keep your mixing palette as well lit as possible. You might wake up to find the colours in your painting different to how you remember the night before but at least you'll be waking up to see a painting, instead of another pile of excuses.

Painting Translucent Light

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 21:41:00 +0000

I enjoy trying to imitate light in paint, it brings me a unique sense of achievement which intoxicates me so much that painting in an abstract style loses all appeal and pales in comparison to trying do do this, which is to create a reality within a juxtaposition of planes of textured colour. And it's something which you can improve with practice and unlike with abstract painting, it is easy to gauge improvement, you can see when you're getting better. I've lost interest in most contemporary art I see because they seem to be doing something completely foreign to what I like doing, I'd prefer to be called a painter than an artist.

Here I've painted some grapes. I saw a painting of translucent grapes in a magazine and then some more on flickr, they were very inspiring and I wanted to have a go myself. The key seemed to be to have strong light behind the grapes so I bought some and put them in front of a window on my nicest plate. It worked as I had planned, in fact better because I hadn't anticipated the interesting way the grapes would flop down at the edges. The grapes are as I saw them, maybe a little greener, I tried putting some strawberries in the scene but quite like this simple composition.

Canvas Prep 1: Stretching the Canvas

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 22:27:00 +0000

Now I won't pretend to be an expert canvas stretcher, in fact most of the time when I need a new canvas I find myself looking though my old paintings for the one I like least to paint over. I have lots of failed paintings so it usually isn't difficult finding at least one I'm happy to wipe it off the face of the Earth. However, recently I seem to be having to take canvases off their stretchers (the wooden frame) in order to roll them up and send them through the post. With pine stretchers beginning to pile up in my flat I went to a local art shop and bought a few metres of primed canvas, then armed with a powerful staple gun I looked on YouTube for a clip of the best way to do it. There was a useful video presented by a woman called Ginger Cook which you can find here, the video says that she's a "master artist" and I'm only an amateur artist so go and watch the video if you want some expert advice on canvas stretching.

Here I've provided for you some photos of my second attempt at canvas stretching (the first one went well too but I didn't take any photos). It really is as easy as it looks, hopefully my amateur attempts will encourage you to have a go. The woman in the video says something about using extra equipment when stretching large canvases, but this one was quite large and I didn't have a problem with it not being taut. I pulled the canvas as tight as I could while stapling and this seems to have been enough.

First you start with one side with one staple, then do the opposite side, pulling the canvas tight. Then one staple in each of the remaining two sides. Then you put two more staples on each side of the first set of staples , a few inches from the first ones. The next step is to pull the corners tight, fold them and staple them down. You have to do this stage now because when all the other staples are in place it will be impossible to stretch the corners properly. Finally you go round putting in the rest of the staples.

Apparently this way of stretching a canvas is called a gallery wrap because you only staple it on the back, I'm not sure why they sometimes put staples along the edge too, they are a real hassle to get out again. I'm not sure of the best way to take staples out of pine but the little staple extractors for paper just won't hack it (unless you have an incredible hulk grip). I use a cheap screwdriver and mallet to dig staples out, sometimes I take quite a lot of wood out of the frame too, there must be a better way. Also with the modern extra deep canvases you see everywhere now you wouldn't want to put staples down the edge.

A Year Painting

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 21:16:00 +0000

It has been almost a year since I last posted, I didn't want to repeat myself too much so I left it until I had something useful to say again. Recently I got a new camera which has video capabilities and I've been experimenting with different ways of recording the creative process, with some exciting results playing with time-lapse photography. I'll be posting them here soon.

The time lapse photography came out of my attempts at taking progress shots to document the process of doing a painting. I finally got hold of a tripod, which enables me to take much better progress shots (I had until then been propping my camera on shelves and tables in order to take photos of my paintings). I painted a few scenes of Salamanca and took lots of photos as I painted and uploaded dozens of them on flickr. Now I look at them I see that it's quite tricky to see what I've changed between the photos, a bit like a game of spot the difference. For the painting of my boss and myself at the English school where I teach I took less photos and it's a bit clearer to see what I changed between photos. If you want to see the Salamanca paintings and try to spot the difference, click on the painting thumbnails on the right side of this blog and it will take you to flickr. Here I've included the steps for the painting of Cristina and me at work, it took me about a week to paint. Click on an image to jump to a larger version.

Underdrawing

I had been wanting to paint something with lots of detail so I picked a photo of my boss and myself at work and set about drawing a grid on the canvas. I then transferred the whole image square by square from my computer screen in pencil, fixing it with hairspray as I went (see flickr for more photos of the steps).

A yellow wash

Then to dull some of the pencil lines and bring some unity to the painting I put down a wash of yellow. The paint was thinned with white spirit so as not to completely hide the underdrawing.

Putting in the darkest and lightest areas

To help your to eye gauge the tones of the painting right it's a good idea to put the extremes in at an early stage.

Getting the main colours in the right place

All the hues your eye sees are also altered by their proximity to other tones so the next step is to roughly get the colours right.

More detail

Now comes the hard work, at this point the energy I started the with is beginning to wane and the painting is looking not as good as I hoped, but paintings often feel this way at some point so I hang in there.

Balancing the elements

It's starting to look a bit better as I begin to balance all the tones and the hues with each other and cover more of the yellow underpainting.

Final touches

Finally I bring the painting all together with a bit of fine tuning and a lot of squinting. If I worked on it a bit more then I could probably make it look more real but I am by now very sick of looking at it.

Loosening Up

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 08:34:00 +0000

Sometimes I can get too tied up in detail and lose the bigger picture. It can be nice to relax a little and forget about getting averything in exactly the right place. When I am in a mood obsessed with detail I find myself counting leaves on trees even though I am sure no-one will ever know how many leaves there were in my souce photo, somehow it puts my mind to rest to get them right. I sometimes stumble across painting tutorials on satelite tv channels where an 'artist' is showing how to give the impression of bushes and trees with just a few brush strokes, I'm sorry but I detest this style of painting. The result is something you might find frescoed on the wall of a tacky mediterreanean restaurant, at best. At worst the result is a clichéd and over-stylized image which insults the observer with an assumption that they don't know what a tree really looks like.

On the other hand too much detail can make a painting look amateur if it isn't done well. I sometimes find myself trying to get all the detail of a window frame in when in reality such detail wouldn't be noticed at such a distance. This is especially a waste of time if you want the eye to be drawn to some interesting interaction between figures in the mid-distance instead of some wonkey windows in the background where the frames are almost as thick as the panes of glass.

I was getting a bit fed up over agonising over detail in my last few paintings so I decided to have a bit of fun painting over an old one of a raindrop which I didn't really like. I've included a photo of the original canvas, as you can see it's loaded with texture. As it was it was impossible to get any fine detail so I had to focus on the big picture and do a lot of squinting to try to get the overall balance of colours and tones. The result is that close up it looks a little messy but from a distance it captures the light and reflections. I almost got sidetracked trying to draw all the lines in the straw mat the glass is sitting on but I realised before it was too late and loosened up a bit.

Another thing I would add as a final point is not to be afraid of using grey in colourful paintings, as you can see I used a lot of grey in the reflections in the glass and it fits perfectly with the brightness of the image.

Negative spaces

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:28:00 +0000

One of the great struggles in drawing and painting, for me at least, is the conceptual mind interfering with what I see in front of me. Instead of painting what I see I end up painting what I think I see, not what is really there. A face may become more stylized or a shadow lose its uniqueness. Maybe this is good for some art if you want to express yourself or part of your personality, but what I find beautiful in a painting is to see the light and form of a moment interpreted in paint. I'm still learning so half of my painting turn out awful and the thing I paricularly don't like is when they look amateurish and cliched, this is normally a result of me going on autopilot and painting what I thought was there instead of what really was there.

To compound this mind trickery I find that if you stare at a painting long enough it begins to look correct no matter how bad the proportions. In the past I have on occasion spent hours going into the detail of a portrait to wake up the next morning to find the face tortured with grotesque features, and what makes it worse is the haunting but distorted likeness to the person, it sends a shiver down the spine. Loose portraits can be nice, especially in my opinion if the light, shadow and colours are right. The more detail you put in, the more accurate the proportions need to be or it just looks freaky. For this reason if I'm going to try to do something with a photo-realistic quality I grid up the paper and it saves a lot of wasted time. The painting I did on the left of Mari Cruz involved a very careful preparation with a grid, then all the layers were added very gently so as not to obsure my original markings. Although it is an oil painting there is very little texture, only the highlights where I have raised the white to catch the light. However, all this work can be very boring and there are some tricks which are useful if you are painting more freely and want to avoid interpreting your subject too much.

The point is to see your painting as it really is and this can be done in various ways. Looking in the mirror is a great one. Sometimes I'm amazed at how odd my painting looks when held in a mirror: massive jaw, wonky eyes, it's embarrassing. A hand held mirror can be useful to see both the picture and the subject at the same time. A computer can be used to flip the image or simplify it in various ways: if you are having trouble seeing the tones you can increase the contrast until it's almost black and white, or you can apply a filter to try to get a different view of the picture, with limited layers for example. You can even apply a filter to imitate the image in paint and then paint the computer's painting. I used to do this more but to be honest the more you paint the easier disctinctions are to see, plus there is something to be said for a human's interptetation. Now I like to get everything in the right place and I let my eye interpret the hues and tones. Everyone seems to use Photoshop but I found the completely free PhotoScape was fantastic and the things you can do with the hues can help with any electrically lit photos you have that may look yellow. Play with the sliders and curves too much though and you will end up with something that looks very artificial, use with caution but a little boost on the contrast never hurt anybody.

Another useful trick if you are working from a photograph is to look at your painting and the photo upside down. This can help you to see the shapes you are working from rather than what your mind thinks they should look like: it can be easy to make the eyes too oval or the whites of the eyes too white. The painting of my dad I posted earlier I painted completely upside down at first. When I flipped it I had got some of the features a bit wrong (the size of the forehead made him look a but like Homer Simpson) but it had captured something special about my dad. It's a kind of magic to project somebody's character through the careful placement of colour and form.

The final tool I can think of for the moment, and the subject of the post, is the very useful observation of negative space in viewing a subject. Look at the spaces between the shapes as much as you look at the shapes and things will slot together better. It's a meditation on the Taoist duality of fullness and emptiness, existence and non-existence, but not really, I'm just being pretentious. It is actually just trying to see what is really there.

Underpainting

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:19:00 +0000

I have been painting a lot this month. At the moment I am experimenting with underpainting. I frequently paint directly onto a white canvas but applying a wash of colour mixed with turpuntine can have a great impact on how the painting develops. In this painting of my old friends Sandy and Rebecca I painted the canvas with a wash of burnt sienna. It had to be transparent so as not to obscure the pencil drawing I had done underneath (when painting people I almost always carefully draw an outline in pencil first, it can save a lot of time later when you are trying to obtain a likeness). I mixed the burnt sienna with turps and used a rag to wipe back the paint when the pencil underdrawing was not clearly visible. I had previously fixed the pencil underdrawing with cheap hairspray, this stops the graphite from muddying the underpainting, I am surprised the turpuntine doesn't dissove the hairspray, but it seems to work fine.

Other colours can be used as a wash, I read recently about an artist who does wonderful portraits first covering the canvas with a mixture of flesh tone and grey. As you can see from the painting of Sandy and Rebecca, the underpainting enabled me to leave spaces between subsequent blocks of colour, saving me time and also unifying the colours in the painting. If you look closely you will notice that Sandy's shirt, hand and pint glass are captured very simply. I actually got a bit bored at this point and decided that if I put too much detail in the hand it might detract from his face...excuses, excuses. Even Sandy's face reveals a lot of the underpainting showing through.

Back to Salamanca

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 23:17:00 +0000

The Christmas holidays are coming to an end and I will be flying back to Salamanca via Stanstead and Valladolid tomorrow. Two weeks at home with my parents has been relatively fruitful: I painted my brother, got lots of photos of central London, painted my brother's ex, and painted this painting of the National Gallery in London. I had done a painting of Calle Toro in Salamanca which has been very popular on flickr for its reflections in the wet pavement so I thought I would try to do something similar of some of the sites of London. Conveniently for me the day I went round with my camera it was raining so I got lots of great photos wet streets. The painting took me about a day and I used oils on paper. I think it could have done with a little more work but it is still wet so won't be travelling with me in my hand luggage. I'll do another better one when I get to Spain.

Drawing people's children

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 17:48:00 +0000

People seem to highly value classic portraits of their children, even if they are not particularly interested in art. I do a lot of drawings for friends from digital photos given me, for me they are good practice and save me forking out on Christmas and birthday presents. For me children all look very similar but I'm sure their mothers don't see it this way. For this reason I always draw a grid on the piece of paper and on the digital photo and transfer the image square by square. It doesn't take very long and I usually draw the grid while I'm watching something on tv or listening to the radio, then it's very easy to transfer the photo onto the paper and one doesn't have to worry about making the baby look like sombebody else's baby, or worse...ugly and yet recognisable enough to be the couple's offspring. I can see the parents going around for days worrying 'Does everyone see him like that?'. All this lining up the paper does remove some of the expressive quality but there are plenty of other things to worry about after you've got the proportions correct: too much shading can give that horror movie edge to the child. I find turning the photo upside down and squinting at it can help me see the overall areas of shading and avoid over doing bits. Saying all this, it isn't really hard to achieve a likeness and I would imagine almost anyone could achieve something they could be proud of.

To shade the drawing in I begin with a hard pencil, maybe a HB, I then work in progressively softer pencils, becoming increasingly careful not to smudge the graphite. By the time I'm using a 8B I usually have to put a sheet of paper between my hand and the drawing so as not to smudge it, by this time the harder pencil lines (and the grid) are almost invisible. I use a putty rubber to remove the remaining grid lines and add the occasional highlight. Finally I fix the painting with hairspray.

Of the two drawings I've provided in today's post, the first is of my English student Mariana Galan's granddaughter, and the second is my driving instructor Oscar's baby. I just passed my driving test in Spanish so as a thank you for putting up with me I drew his baby.