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This is the ongoing journal of a lapsed painter, retraining and getting back to the easel. This isn't a slick portfolio site, you'll see as many failures here as successes, but each picture has a story, and is another small step along the way.
Coffee Pot and Lemon - Tone Studies Six
15th July 2007
Having had quite enough of cubes and spheres after the last ten studies I dragged out my old coffee pot and a lemon for a few more. This coffee pot has already featured a few times in the series of tonal still life drawings. It's a good subject for these studies because it presents me with the full range from white across most of it's surface to black on the handle and lid. I have to do some drastic compression to paint it.
Munsell Tone Studies - Part Five
3rd July 2007
Now the starters are out of the way, it's time for the main course.
The original plan with these cubes and spheres was to paint each one in four different lighting conditions. Form light, the first, is three quarters in light, rim light is the opposite, three quarters in shadow. The other two are back light, with all the object in shadow, and front light, with no shadows. Time will tell whether or not I get the whole lot done. I'm half way through the first batch now, here they are.
Munsell Tone Studies- Part Four
3rd July 2007
Having been blessed with a series of overcast days last week (which means no direct sunlight coming through the window in the afternoon) I've had the opportunity to move on somewhat with the tone studies.
For this batch I've been adding the odd real object to supplement the cubes and spheres. It's been illuminating.
25th June 2007
The cubes keep coming. I've now answered one or two questions I've had for a while about tone, and raised many more. There have been moments over the last few days at the easel when I've felt that this subject - translating light into paint - is too difficult to grasp. But like Magnus Magnusson, I've started so I'll finish.
The first and most important point I need to make today is that I've realised that I'd got my Munsell scale wrong in the last couple of posts.
Munsell Cubes - A Tone Exercise (part 2)
18th June 2007
This post follows on from last Saturday's, which was the beginning of some simple exercises with cubes painted in the Munsell neutral scale. Simple in that all I've done so far is paint three cubes, but I have a feeling that it was one of the most useful exercises I've done yet with regard to tone.
Having come up with a way of working out the relationships between the tones of the white cube, the most obvious next step was to put all three cubes together in one painting. That will extend the range further, and dramatically increase the number of tones to control. I planned to use the same system as I did for the white cube, but to be honest I was too excited and steamed straight in with what you might call guesses for the tonal relationships. I've never been good with numbers.
Munsell Cubes - A Tone Exercise
16th June 2007
For some time now I've been preoccupied with tone. The more I work with it, the more I become convinced that a well observed balance of tones is the key to creating a feeling of light, and by extension form. Frank Reilly reckoned that tones (well, being from the US he called them values) are 80% of a good picture. Who am I to disagree?
But I've been wrestling with a basic problem in painting for as long as I've been interested in tone: How to deal with the fact that the available value range from light to dark is much more narrow in paint than it is in nature. Today's exercises have finally convinced me that I've got the answer to that problem - or at least, one answer. This post is going to get a bit technical, and there'll be numbers involved. For that I apologise, but there's no avoiding it.
Old Silver - Sugar Bowl and White Flower
27th May 2007
Following on from yesterday's post of the first sketches of the old silver sugar bowl and spoons, I've now done two more sketches of the white flower in the sugar bowl.
The main problem I needed to address with these two sketches was how to make the white flower work in the painting as a white flower, whilst keeping the highlights of the silver as the lightest light by enough of a step up from the flower to make them read as bright, reflected light. The silver won't work if the highlights aren't convincing. Since these sketches are going to be worked up into a bigger painting, there's not much point in me going further with the planning of this painting unless I'm pretty sure I can make the values work.
26th May 2007
Continuing the theme of planning I dealt with in the last post, this post covers the early stages of the planning of a new painting.
The subject of this painting is a collection of old silver objects. I know, silver again. But I like to paint silver, especially old silver. Apart from it being very pretty, it represents quite a difficult challenge in terms of the values. For some time now, I've been concentrating on values, and I expect to do so for some time to come. I think it's important.
Silver Vase - Planning a Painting
20th May 2007
Some years ago I used to paint commercial murals, in theme pubs and the like. I can clearly remember the experience of my first big mural, largely because it was one of the most horrendous working experiences of my life - entirely of my own doing, I might add.
The space I had to fill was roughly twenty metres across, and the mural was to be the centrepiece for a themed cafe being built as part of a big refurb job, a huge warehouse being converted into a night club in Stoke on Trent. I had six weeks to do it, I was one of the last on the job, and holding up the opening was not an option.
Bargue Plate 5 - Second Schematic
7th May 2007
Finally, after ten or eleven hours work across several sessions, I've got this plate to the stage of the second schematic drawing.
At this stage, all the main points which define the drawing have been placed and joined. I can now start to get some idea of how close I'm getting with my copy. So far, it doesn't look too bad, but I'm sure that as I move to the next stage, refining the outline, I'll find lots of mistakes.