Two Cloud Sketches

watercolour/gouache 15x10cm

Now that our windows are scaffold-free, quick sky studies are a pleasant distraction from slogging away at the Works in Progress. A lot of them end up overworked and messy, but these two are quite lean and clear.

They are on grey A4 from the local stationers – cut into quarters and used unstretched. The grey allows the white gouache highlights to work much better; on white paper, they can appear slightly yellow.

Viewing images on the computer usually flatters them, but that’s not the case here. The play between transparency and opacity doesn’t really come across – seen ‘live’, they fizz a lot more.

Which is, after all, how it should really be.

Sycamore

oil on canvas 51x41cm

I’ve been having a look at the different lights and translucencies through leaves and trees, and I wanted to explore what was going on when a tree is strongly lit directly full-on. This is quite a dramatic sycamore growing on Bruntsfield Links, just next to Bruntsfield Crescent.

Compositionally I think it works quite well – it’s fairly symmetrical, with the main subject dead centre and lit from straight behind the viewer. The open spaces between the clumps of leaves allow the silhouetting of the dark branches against the bright cloud (which wasn’t actually there but was pulled in from somewhere else).

Most of this was painted with the biggest brushes I could get away with (I’ve just bought a whole lot), and possibly I should have gone to the smaller sizes sooner. The brushwork is quite active, which I quite like, though maybe some of the leaf textures could have been done more convincingly with smaller, more considered, marks.

I’m not an expert in tree identification, and I say it is a ‘Sycamore’ (Acer Pseudoplatanus) because it matches the little pictures and description of a ‘Sycamore’ in my little Dorling-Kindersley ‘Trees’ book. My book also usefully adds, in a tiny footnote - ‘This species is known as a plane tree in Scotland but has no connection with the true planes (Platanus)’.

I don’t think a lot of people know that…

World Cup Sketches

pen

You really do have to be fast when sketching the footie. They’re moving about quite a lot (mostly) and it comes down to memorising a flash image - which is good eyeball practice. I can’t remember which matches these figures are from, though the two on the left of the lower group are definitely second-round Ghanaian.

Obviously, there are no sketches of any England players here. Had I been drawing during their three matches I would no doubt have been able to produce fully finished portraits, such was the urgency with which they strolled about.

Serpent and Cherubim

oil on canvas 78x107cm

This is the Grand Project for which all those drawings of trees, hands, and Anton Walbrook were made. At over a metre high, for me it’s quite a large-scale figure composition, and I’ve been working on it for a while. I finished it earlier this month, and still don’t really know whether I’ve been successful or not.

Some of the drawing isn’t bad, and I’m quite pleased with the composition. I like the way the guard stands in a narrow space that curves towards us from under the trees, and how the shapes of the armour, walls and visor rhyme with it. In this lower section the forms are all man-made. In the upper section they are organic, chaotic, scary, and are intruding into the organised space.

You can, of course, supply your own interpretation of what’s going on, but there is a specific narrative. The clues are there – my nephew got it with only a little prompting, so if you want to solve it without help, stop reading now.

First of all, there’s the title; does it refer to the figures, and where might you find those two together? Is the coldly detached, sinister man in the tree the Serpent or Cherubim, and why do you think that? Why is the armed guard wearing a (rather obvious) angel-wing lock emblem? Who or what is he guarding? What is going on between the figures and what are they thinking about each other – if at all? The answer is coming up next.

The painting is a response to the question ‘What happened next back at the Garden of Eden?’ and is a sequel to January’s ‘Expulsion – Marchmont’ (The armed guard features in both). Satan is still mooching around and his only diversion is the Cherubim at the gate, and he can’t do anything else but try to undermine and subvert him. My guess is that he’d start by giving him a cigarette, and lighting it. The painting shows the moment before the cigarette is lit.

I strongly urge you to look at this while listening to the Rolling Stones single ‘Gimme Shelter’. It has a potent atmosphere of menace and foreboding, and was my mood-setter while getting this done. Play it through and let your gaze rove all over the painting - you’ll probably end up at the cigarette/face/lighter area, but take your time.

The model I used for the angel’s face was Madam, who was very pleased to have her very own halo. She doesn’t smoke, but has a dark, unfulfilled desire for cigarettes, and was disturbingly exhilarated to be immortalised as just about to have one.

Scaffolding

oil on card 28x20cm

So, just after stating to someone that I never wanted to do another painting featuring chimney-pots – I go and paint this.

As you see, our building is being worked on, and the view out of the front window has strange angular intersections. It’s an ill wind that blows no silver lining, and as not everyone gets the chance to experience a bird-in-a-cage’s-eye view, you may get some benefit from our experience.

Seriously, it is quite an interesting subject. I had to think quite carefully about the focus – was I trying to paint the pretty view through the scaffolding, or the scaffolding with the view as backdrop? As it’s turned out I think I’ve painted quite a balanced work, and the eye can settle on one without being distracted by the other.

The sky blues are quite luminous. I’m putting this down to the careful use of Pthalo and Prussian Blues, touched with Payne’s grey, and Zinc White – in a damar/walnut oil medium. This is quite a translucent mix, so glows quite nicely even though it’s on a grey primer.

Interesting little work, but I do wish the building guys would hurry up and finish…

Sketch - Night Sky

watercolour and gouache 14.5x10.5cm

My watercolour and gouache gear was set up at the window already, as I’d spent most of the day sat there dashing off yet more very quick, very small cloud sketches (without particularly good results - the damned things simply will not keep still… the clouds that is). I slapped this out while waiting for the news on the telly.

I have to say that I’m not that hot with gouache; it changes SO much as it dries, and the Permanent White – well… it’s more like Here-today, gone-in-five-minutes White. The underneath stuff always seems to bleed through it, screwing up the tones. I’ll persevere, though; it’s a matter of using it, and finding what works and what doesn’t.

Like pure watercolour - which I do have a handle on – the more opaque gouache is particularly useful for instant work, but without having to think too much about preserving the surface white.

Theoretically…

Cumulus Clouds

watercolour 20x19cm

A very quick sketch of some very puffy cumulus masses in bright sunlight. I liked the contrast between the lower cumulus and the straight bands of background cirrus.

Only one colour used here – Payne’s Grey – which IS actually as blue as it appears on this scan. The paper is heavy-ish A4 copy paper. It’s not absorbent at all, hence the pools and blobs, and had to be flattened later (successful).

You have to work a little bit to read the lower half, but I quite like its overall freshness and spontaneity.

Portrait Re-draw

oil on cellophane

This is a cellophane correction sheet on two different backgrounds. I made it in a final attempt to get a likeness in a troublesome portrait. The clear cellophane was taped over the (dry) painting and the face safely redrawn and painted on it in oil paint, without disturbing what good stuff there was on the original surface. It’s a bit like using Photoshop layers. The cellophane is a huge improvement on using tracing paper for corrections, and for trying out and adding new elements to an established painting.

Once happy with the new likeness, I traced the face in ink lines on a new cell sheet, removed it from the painting, and pricked out the lines with a needle. I taped this pierced ‘cartoon’ (yes, that’s the technical term) back onto the painting, and lightly worked water-based gouache paint through the holes. When the cartoon was removed there was a map of the new, corrected image over the original, inaccurate work. I repainted that with oil, using the dots as guides, with the painted cell propped up nearby as a model. Any anomalous gouache dots were washed away with water. It’s actually quite simple. You can see what a difference this correction made by having a look at the ‘Works in Progress’ link to the right.

This sheet looked so fresh and alive, even though it has alignment marks all over it and was taped to a piece of cardboard, that I may get it properly framed up as a work in itself.

The really tricky bit was making the corrections. I had to make the image unfamiliar so that I wouldn’t be repeating the same old mistakes. The new image was created by studying both the painting/cell and my reference image in a mirror facing the easel, then turning round and applying the paint the right way round.

Now, that actually wasn’t simple…

Study - Anton Walbrook

pencil 20x19cm

I needed a face I could reference for the painting. It had to be a mixture of sophisticated, remote, a bit strange, and also quite powerful. I quite liked the idea of a nineteen thirties/forties smoothie.

Anton Walbrook in Powell and Pressburger’s ‘The Red Shoes’ was perfect. He plays Lermontov, the manipulative impresario. Madam has the DVD, so I played it on the computer, took screenshots, and with a bit of tweaking, got the model I wanted.

The drawing took less than two hours, very fast for me, and I think it’s a good one. It actually looks like the subject, is full of information about form, and the marks are quite deft and confident. This is one of those occasional bits of work where you look at it the next day and think ‘Did I do that?’ (in a good way).

I find doing ‘portraits’ extremely difficult; you have to be very good to do it consistently, and it’s something I should practice more. In reproducing specific faces and expressions the variables are so many, and the tolerances so critical, that a likeness can easily slide into a similar person – in this case, Stewart Grainger or David Farrar.

This phenomenon is quite similar to the way that the theme tune for ‘the High Chaparral’ turns resolutely into ‘Telstar’.

I think this needs serious scientific research.

Studies for Painting

pencil on A4 – photoshop montage

Over the past month I’ve been working exclusively on the current larger project, but doing quite a few more contributory studies. These are some of them. The individual scans haven’t been tweaked in size or contrast, though some have been cropped from A4 to avoid swathes of blank. Click on the picture to get a bigger image you can stick your nose into.

Through ‘Works in Progress’ (in ‘Related Links’ – to the right) you can see the main painting - two figures - and how it has developed so far. The ‘Slideshow’ button on that site is good for that. You may recognize where the studies have been copied, though not all have been used.

At the moment, painting this particular work feels a bit like writing a Large Novel, and quite a lot of problems still need to be solved. It doesn’t really help that I naturally seem to be a bit of a slow worker.

…as I’m sure my former customers and employers already know.

Tree Studies

pencil on A4

I needed some reference material - weird-looking tree parts - for use in a current project. I had taken some photos of likely subjects, but as they never print out how you’d want, I thought I’d draw them from the computer screen.

Though laborious, there are two big advantages to working this way.

Firstly, it is easier to edit the information from the source. A photo of a tree contains so much information you’re never going to use – background, tiny branches etc, which just get in the way. Better to decide what you’re going to use or lose at this stage than later.

Secondly, you are better acquainted with the subject’s form – its mass and shape - when it comes to painting it on the canvas proper, having already examined and described it once before.

Contrast these drawings with the watercolour ‘Street Sketches’ from last month. Those look effective, but you would be hard put to reconstruct the forms from the information given. These drawings above are utilitarian; I have to put in all the information I think I’m going to need for reproduction in a larger painting.

Not that you can’t be creative. The upper drawing is a composite of two different trees (one wasn’t effective enough for purpose) and, to be honest, it would have taken longer to photoshop the two images together and not been as good.

Ah, yes - and Thirdly, it’s very good drawing practice.

Expulsion - Marchmont

oil on canvas 84x69cm

Finally, at long last, it’s done. I’ve been working on this on and off since May 2009, and drip-feeding it into ‘Works in Progress’. At 84x69cm it felt ambitious but it was more than about time I stopped restricting myself to tiny pieces.

The location is recognisably Marchmont, Edinburgh, the chapel transposed from a block away. I think the painting works quite well as a decorative urban landscape, but there is also a strong underlying narrative.

At first glance it’s a slightly fantastical street scene of some trees behind a wall, and three figures. When you have figures in a painting, you can often construct a narrative, maybe even the one that you’re meant to. You just need to ask a few questions, like; where have the couple come from and where are they going? Why is there an armed guard on the gate? The couple could be Adam and Eve, so are there snake or god references anywhere? If we’re correct, they’ve just been thrown out of a pretty free and unrestricted place (by all accounts) into an uncomfortable world of hard edges and rules. Does that fit? If so, what are the characters’ states of mind?

Well, most of the clues are there somewhere: the gated wall, the snake-branched apple tree, a chapel. As the title indicates, this painting shows the expulsion from Eden, but set here and now. It’s a very traditional subject, usually as a good excuse to show nudey bodies, but it’s also one where you can explore big human emotions as well.

I was listening to all sorts of stuff while working on this, but especially ‘The Twelve Dreams of Dr Sardonicus’. The track ‘Soldier’ resonated very strongly once the figures were in place.

There’s a lot of chlorophyll represented in this painting, and I’ve always been a bit nervous about greens. Chrome and Viridian are docile but expensive. Terre Verte is lovely but weak. That really only leaves (gulp) - Phthalocyanine. I’ve got its blue cousin house-trained, but those pthalo greens – they’re still out there… feral.

Street Sketches

montage - figures between 5-16cm high

We live in a flat above an office, about fifteen feet up, and an angled window bay looks up the street. I often stand or sit there and draw people as they walk past. A lot of the sketches simply don’t work out, but these are some of the more successful ones. (Best viewed if you click the picture above – you’ll get a much, much bigger version).

I use whatever medium comes to hand. It just so happens that I have the watercolour gear up at the window just now and am trying to improve my technique with oriental brushes. These are great for drawing because you can go from a very fine mark to a great splodge in one stroke. The mass of hair holds a huge amount of paint, and you don’t have to keep replenishing the brush every few seconds.

The observable period of the passers-by is usually about 60 - 45 seconds, during which they will have changed aspect. Then you have a little bit of ‘memory time’ before forgetting things and inventing. I have the full palette of watercolour available, but it’s fastest to paint in monochrome - normally Payne’s Grey or Sepia - and if need be, write colour notes afterwards. The paper is ordinary A4 computer paper, and wrinkles very easily when wet, but it’s very cheap and convenient for these exercises. The paint quality, though, IS important, as lesser paints fade and pale disappointingly when dry, and the denser artist’s stuff always goes so much further.

I don’t know who any of these folk are, except one. I’m glad to say that Madam recognized herself as the figure in the bottom right corner.

(Coat, trousers, shoes – black. Scarf – red)

Ye Pirate Xmas

photoshop

Slight departure from the tangible here.

For the last decade or so, Madam and I have had themed Christmasses (Roman, Horror, Viking, Bollywood amongst others) and it’s my job to produce an e-post for friends and family announcing the theme. So, here’s this year’s Work of Photoshop for the Pirate Xmas we’ve just enjoyed; Madam, myself, and Viv the cat placed in N.C. Wyeth’s cover illustration for Treasure Island.

As far as the painting has been concerned recently, I’ve been catching up on the Big Wood painting in progress, preparing a couple of larger canvasses and a figure composition to do on one of them, and drawing people out the front window (I’ll post some of these soon - they’re quite interesting), till Xmas took over. Back to the grindstone of pigment and binder in the New Year, and wishing you all a Happy and Prosperous One.

Aaaarr

Beech Leaves

oil on canvas 51x41cm

Quite a tough subject, and it took a few days longer than anticipated.

The different shapes and colours of this mass of leaves was a very interesting texture. I wasn’t sure if a pile of leaves on its own would have a strong enough structure, so I put them in a box. And then added the pair of manikins. After a few days, I realised that the leaves and box would have been fine without the figures, but by then it was too late to remove them. I suppose a narrative could be constructed around them, but they are an unnecessary element.

I used focus to describe the complex mass of leaves, and there is a big difference between the paint handling of the front leaves and those towards the rear. At the front they are quite sharply drawn, with thicker paint, and at the back the paint gets thinner and more blurred. If I’ve done it right, you should be able to cover one eye and experience depth and solidity.

It’s the first concentrated piece of work since August and I’m really happy to have done it, even though it was quite a hard slog. But then again, that’s what it’s all about.