Colour Mixing

While I'm ever so slowly building up the colour again on the clothe with successive glazes of cadmium red, I'm stopping to let the other areas of the painting catch up. First the leaves. The chroma has been too intense a green for several weeks. I tried several different mixtures to dull the chroma. Adding cadmium orange, and later burnt umber, didn't work for me. In theory, the compliment of red in the burnt umber or a close complimentary in orange should have done the trick, but only made them "hotter". So I think mixed a range of neutral grey values and added each to the range of greens on my largest leaf -- in equal measure... And now the greens are cooling off.

This week I'm going to tackle the background. It only has a first thin layer of dead colour on it. The correct recipe for the background green is ivory black + yellow ocre + some burnt umber... We debated at the school whether I should paint over the outline of the bottle completely and then paint the bottle on top. Bottle, being transclucent, would have some background green showing throw... But it in the real life set up, it's a different green (blue green, mostly vermillion) and the right edge of it is very prominent. So the consensus is to paint the bottle as I see it at the same time as the background and then blend the edges in.  One edge I need to deal with a.s.a.p is the place where the clothe recedes into the background. I have yet to turn it away from the front and blend it into the green wall.

Indirect Painting again -- three Saturdays

I'm still learning about this method called indirect painting. For a couple of weeks in a row, I've built up a layer of opaque white on the red cloth. The whitest white is supposed to represent the brightest part of the cloth, a brightness that can't be achieved any other way. The white painting sitting on top of my previous layers of cadmium red became quite tacky and slow to dry. I finally achieved what was needed on March 6th. A week later it was dry enough to put a thin layer of cadmium red back on top (March 13th). Finally, last week (March 20th), I added a second glaze of cadmium red and began trying to model the shape of the roll in the cloth, as well as the cloth's shadows. The shadows are a mixture of Alizarin Crimson and Cadmium Red. The lightest areas of the roll are probably as light now as I need them to be and I can darken the edges and the shadows in the next few weeks...

Saturday March 6

Saturday March 13

Saturday March 20

Mixing the green in the leaves has been another challenge. While it's easy to mix a solid green of high chroma (a "green" green), it's more difficult to tone down that greenness to make it seem more natural. I have the values correct, but my leaves are oppresively green. I first added Cadmium Orange to my mix, but that resulted in an odd warming effect, like a leaf in autumn about to turn. What I need to do is mix in Burnt Umber, whose "redness" is the complimentary of green and will "grey down" the green. Another way of achieving the same thing is to mix in a neutral "grey" (made by combining ivory black, raw umber, and white). An infusion of grey drains a colour of its chroma -- in my case, it should dull down the green very quickly.

I'll take some close-ups next time. These pictures were taken about 10 feet back from the easel and then cropped...

Indirect Painting -- getting a start on it

Today, I moved on modelling the white pot, laid down some fresh green on the leaves, and then got a start on something new with the cloth: Indirect Painting.

Background: Some colours are so bright and intense that there's no way to mix the paint to achieve realistic highlights. If you merely mix white and red to achieve a lighter red, pink will result. The same thing will happen with some bright greens, blues, and violets. In my still life exercise here, I have a bright red cloth (almost pure cadmium red) with a large roll in it. I tried modelling the lightest part of the roll with cadmium orange and yellow mixed in with the red, but even that didn't brighten up the area in the way I wanted... So that's why indirect painting has to be done.

Here's the general idea: To achieve highlights, a coat of white is put down first over the original local colour (cadmium red). When the white dries, glazes of red are reapplied and the white shines through, not as pink but as a lighter red.

To begin, the original layer of red must be completely dry so that the fresh white doesn't combine with it to make pink. A small test confirms this. Next, pure white is added in all areas where the cloth is a lighter red than its local colour, in my case pure cadmium red, a perfect 5 on the value scale of 0 to 9. Where the red cloth is at its lightest, I applied the white paint at its full intensity. (Note: Juan recommended mixing some calcium carbonate to my flake white to ensure it would be as opaque as possible). As I move from the lightest red to the local colour red, I thin out and blend the white paint towards the pure red.

Two brushes are needed: one to lay down the pure white, and one absolutely clean brush to blend it out and lift it off as your move to the darker reds... (The mantra I think is: brush in, brush out)

In my picture below, the whitest whites are where the cloth shows off the lightest reds...

In two weeks' time, this white will be dry. Then I'll begin adding glazes of red on top. There no harm in having the white too white; I can always darken later. But the reverse is not true: If after applying the red glazes I find that the highlights are not bright enough because the white underneath was not opaque enough, then tough luck. It's too late to fix it.

Varnishing, Part 2

Varnishing is a controversial subject -- it seems to fire up emotions among the painters I've asked. Everyone has had a bad experience and a different theory as to why. Remedies also vary.

After applying three coats of varnish on the Juliano painting and not liking the results, I stripped it off one evening with mineral spirits using makeup pads (note: use odorless mineral spirits next time, and sponges not cotton pads, which leave hairs behind). Then I applied two fresh coats of varnish and it suddenly took much better to the canvas. The oil wasn't repelling it. Hypothesis: removing the mineral spirits left tiny scratches on the surface of the paint layer, giving the varnish something to hold on to. The results are good.

I also varnished the Patroclus painting, shown below. The first coat was almost perfect, only a tiny fraction of the varnish was repelled. The second coat, which I put on last night, looks good but now emphasizes some of the hairs and particles that settled between coats. Perhaps next time I'll stop at one layer of varnish.

I'm also considering building a varnishing cover to protect that painting from dust and hair. Two artists at the school have built one that's connected to their home dryer's ventilation system. A fan on the cover pulls in air through filters on the sides and blows it out through the dryer's vent.

With all of the photos I've taken of this painting, the automatic digital camera never picks up the warm colours of the skin. It seems to focus on the white of the shoulder and wash out everything else. I'm hoping a new SLR camera will help me solve that in the future.

Still Life continues...

The last two weeks, I've been working right to left, with a focus on the right half of the tea pot and cloth. I now need to finish reshaping the spout -- pushing it up and lengthening it -- and pushing in the pot's top left side. Next step will be to improve on the pot's colour (there should be more brown around the spout and less green; plus more purple on the top right side and less grey). Finally, I'll move onto the leaves, which still have their thin layer of dead colour. Things are moving along...

Varnishing -- first attempt

A layer of varnish is supposed to help protect a painting from dirt, dust and air pollution, as well as mechanical damage (like scratching). It also restores a painting’s original brilliant colours (oil paint tends to become dull and discoloured over time). Varnish also homogenizes (evens out) the final appearance of a painting.

After waiting nearly two years, I was ready to give varnishing a try with my first oil painting, the monochrome Juliano painting. Last Sunday, I mixed the Gamvar varnish (which is a component system consisting of solvent and synthetic resin crystals that mimic old fashioned resin from trees) and then gave the painting two coats this week with a gentle edger foam brush. I took the picture below just after I finished the second layer...

The paint certainly comes alive but I immediately noticed one problem: In some areas, the varnish seems to be repelled. I've highlighted a sample area below in red. Enlarge the picture and you'll see some patches where the varnish has not been absorbed. 

It's a known problem with  varnish. The general consensus is that some areas may contain excessive oil from the last layers of paint applied in the Second Painting phase. It's in this phase that the pure pigment is mixed with oil (linseed oil) to create smooth glasses. Dark areas of a painting tend to be worked over more than the lighter areas and so there's a risk that they'll react differently to varnish (or vice versa).

Today, I tried to fill in some of the pockets with a brush, but that didn't work well, so I've applied a third coat across the entire painting. Fortunately, more varnish has soaked in now and the pockets are less prominent. At the same time, however, the third layer seems to emphasize any flaws in the canvas, such as bumps and knots in weave of the canvas.  A good frame will make a difference though.

Red reflection in the teapot

This week, I concentrated on the teapot, trying to model the shadows while also building up the shadows of the cloth alongside. The teapot is still too "blue", so I've been repainting it with some yellow ochre mixed into the white in the lightest areas, and raw umber in the shadow areas. That's a work in progress -- I haven't done anything yet around the spout, which is still too grey. I'll be adding some green to that side.

The red reflection on the right side does complicate things. It reaches up into the half-tones of the shadows in the teapot more than I appreciated before. On my first go, the underlying red shone through beautifully over a layer of grey that I had added. But now the grey has dried too opaque, and so I need to go back over it with a glaze of cadmium red again. This coming week, I'll be building up the shadows of the cloth and redrawing the contour of the pot on the right side. The shadow will be built up with pure Alizorin Crimson. Juan also suggested blending some Alizorin Crimson and Cadmium Red to create some of the frayed ends of the cloth, particularly in the spot where the cloth rolls.

Strange beginning

My still life has had a strange beginning, it seems to me. But I've been following the correct approach. The current phase goes by three names used interchangeably.

• Dead Colour: the paint you first apply gets soaked up by the "ground" of the panel or canvas, leaving it looking rather dull. Yup.
• Local Colour: the goal is to paint the true colour of the objects. That is, the colour you'd see if there were no lights and shadows and reflections changing the colour of the object. It's almost impossible to get this right so they just tell us to put down whatever you can,
• First Inlay: Add a thin layer the consistency of house paint, and then let it dry. It's tempting to want to fix the colour at your first go while it's still fresh, but then you make the mistake of doubling the layer of paint.  

I'm nearly done this stage, with just a bit more work to do on the tea pot (which I'll explain below).

The red cloth is what gives this phase its strangeness for me. Wherever it sits, whether in light or in shadow, it has to be given a strong underpainting of its local colour, almost pure Cadmium Red. The reason is, I'm told, I'll never have another chance to give it its true "redness"-- it's all shadows of Alizorin Crimson and tints of Tintanium White after this. The red cloth is also reflected along the side and bottom of the teapot, and so it too gets a treatment of Cadmium Red too, although I haven't done a good job yet of blending it with the teapot's local colour.
At this moment then, I have a large red blob on the panel, much larger than the equivalent red that will be seen in the finished painting. I can still see the boundaries of my drawing for shadows and the edge of the pot, so that hasn't been lost.

The white teapot also needs more work because it isn't really a white. I did a quick lay in with variants of grey, but it's obviously too cool a grey. It should have been mixed with raw umber as well for the shadow areas (especially bottom) and a dash of yellow ochre for the centre. Next time.  

One other note I forgot to document. When I first started, I wanted to go from the centre out, light to dark. This was wrong. The dark values are needed first around the teapot to know how light it really is. And so the background top, sides, and bottom were completed first.

Still Life Underway

It has taken a while to get going... The first obstacle was choosing and finding an appropriate "canvas" to paint on. Store-bought primed and stretched canvas, while cheap, proved to be disappointing (made in China). I stretched my own canvas and primed it 3 more times, and the result was much better... But then I was persuaded to try painting on the best possible linen, primed with lead white (which won't flake or yellow)and mounted on archival-quality panels.

I bought and imported 2 ready-made boards from the States (New Traditions Panels), shown below. The first is baltic birch, sealed on the back with a triple coat of Polyurethane to keep the moisture out and minimize warping. The second is Dibond, a sturdy archival aluminum composite material made of two lightweight sheets with a thermal plastic core. Conservators recommend this panel because it's not supposed to warp.



The second obstacle was getting the canopy installed above the objects to create the shadows I want. Once that was done, I was able to finish the cartoon. Although I could have drawn directly on the panel with paint, I wasn't entirely certain how I would end up positioning the drawing. And so a paper cartoon gave me a chance to make changes without consequences. In the end, I made the drawing vertical and chose new dimensions: 12" wide by 16" tall.

In the photo below, the red squares represent the "Frame". After I snapped the picture, I noticed that tape holding up the red cloth behind the tea pot had fallen off, so the cloth is flatter than it should be...



As an experiment, I tried a different approach to transferring the cartoon to the panel. I first coated the paper with raw umber. The oil in the paint was soon absorbed, leaving only the pigment. I then positioned the cartoon over the panel and retraced the drawing with a knitting needle. The end result is below. It's cleaner than if I had used charcoal (the usual approach).

Varnishing Demo

November 23rd: I finally witnessed a demonstration of varnishing, given by Juan Martinez at the school.

The painting had been left to dry for over a year, although only 6 months is needed. Any earlier than that and there's a risk that the varnish will bond with the uppermost paint layers. And the lowest layers may not have settled yet.

Juan washed his painting gently with a damp cloth on a flat surface. Then he opened up a box of Gamblin's Gambar varnish and mixed the 2 components -- resin chemicals dissolved with solvent. GAMBLIN's is the best brand becase it does not yellow over time and remains easy to remove with mild solvents for cleaning in the future (so that the paint layers won't be harmed). Adding it as the top layer of a painting saturates the colors and intensifies the transparency of glazes.

Wearing rubber gloves, Juan mixed only what he needed and poured it into a flat pan. The varnish can't be stored for long once mixed. If it's kept longer than 6 weeks, the varnish loses its UV protection and other qualities.

Re: application.... Instead of a brush, he picked up a sponge edger (for house painting), dipped it in a pan of varnish, wiped off the excess, and then applied a single thin coat to the entire painting.



It looks like a coat of water. But the mineral spirits soon dissolve, leaving a glossy finish. After drying for 24 hours, the painting can be given a second coat to make it glossier. Only 2 layers are necessary.

I found an online demo from Gamblin here.