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How to Paint Like the Masters: Part 7, Window Shading and Glazing

07 Tuesday Feb 2012

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Maria (unfinished) by Joshua LaRock, during the window shading stage over top of ebauche

This is the stage in the painting where it all starts to come together.  In part six of this series of posts on how to paint like the masters, we left off when finishing the ebauche, a thin layer of paint and turpinoid with a few drops of oil mixed in, to set the tone of the painting.

Today, we will address layer two, using a thicker coat of paint, mixed with retouch varnish and oil (either poppy, walnut of linseed).  Later, we’ll discuss the glazing.

Start out by scumbling retouch varnish or oil over the ebauche.  The brings the full color to life again.  When choosing how to mix your lights, keep in mind that titanium white is stronger and colder, while flake white is more transparent and warmer.

Window shading is step two of painting in the classical 19th century French academic method.  They call it that because it is like pulling a shade down on a window, working in full detail from the top to the bottom of the canvas.  Finishing the painting is the goal for this stage.  Watch your model carefully for subsurface scattering–when light passes through and reflects inside the skin, like your hand in front of a flashlight.  Places common to seeing subsurface scattering are under the eyelids, the ears, the nose and hands.  Anywhere where your skin is thinner and more blood comes to the surface, you will see this subtle glowing effect.

After the window shading layer dries, you should have a completed painting.  If you would like to deepen the shadows more or add more transparency to the painting, consider a third layer, by glazing and scumbling.  Check out the detail from John Waterhouse’s Flora and the Zephyrs, where he used many layers of glaze to achieve a glowing look to her skin, fabric and roses.

Detail from Flora and the Zephyrs by John Waterhouse

 

Glazing: dark, thinned paint over lighter paint

Scumbling: Light paint, thicker and more opaque, over dark paint

In order to glaze and scumble, the painting must be completely dry, otherwise you risk rubbing out all your hard work.

To make something look glowing like oranges in a still life, glazing is the way to go.  If something looks transparent, paint it with transparent layers.  For the glazing layer, use GamVar, made by Gamblin, with a sponge brush.

Minneolas, by Joshua LaRock, oil on linen, 2009

That’s the final layer.  Congratulations on learning how to paint like the masters!

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How to Paint Like the Masters: Part 6, Painting the Ebauche

03 Friday Feb 2012

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Almost-completed Ebauche stage by Joshua LaRock 2011

This post will continue our journey we began several posts ago, picking up where we left off at the last stage of rendering the drawing.  We are beginning this post with the assumption that you have in front of you a canvas with the transferred drawing on it, the very correct drawing that you’ve been working so hard on!

These are notes that I am sharing with you again from that particularly helpful workshop led by Joshua LaRock that I took at the Grand Central Academy of Art this past summer.

I remember when this day came at last, it was the beginning of the second week, and a Monday.  I was so excited to begin painting!  However, the teacher lectured for a while before we could begin…which was exactly what most of us needed.  I gained a wealth of information, without which my painting would not have improved.

We began the morning with some basic definitions, and built from there.

The Ebauche: Layer 1 of paint, a thinned down value study with mostly turpenoid and a few drops of oil.

Beginning the Ebauche, by Joshua LaRock 2011

Value: the lightness or darkness

Hue:  Color (red, yellow, green, blue)

Chroma: the intensity relative to neutral (gray)

All skintones are a mixture of yellow and red.

The plane most perpendicular (most facing) the light is the most chromatic (the most color, ignoring the hightlights).  As a form turns away from the light, the color gets darker in value and less in chroma.  The highest chromatic (color intense) colors are straight from the tube.  The hightest chroma paints are the cadmium colors.  When painting shadows, remember that black is actually a very dark blue.  On a one color object, keep the HUE (pure color) at all costs, no matter how light or dark things get.

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Mandarins, 11″x14″, Joshua LaRock 2009

When setting up the pallete, try to stay organized.  Your pallette is a reflection of your mind.  Start out to the left with the yellows, then go to the reds, then the greens, and lastly blues.  Below is a list of the exact paints we used for the full pallette, in order of how they should be laid out on the pallette.

1. White

2. Lemon Yellow

3. Cadmium Yellow

4. Naples Yellow

5. Yellow Ochre

6. Raw Sienna

7. Raw Umber

8. Cadmium Orange

9. Cadmium Red

10. Venetian Red

11. Alizarin Crimson

12. Burnt Umber

13. White

14. Cadmium Green

15. Sap Green

16. Viridian Green

17. Cerulean Blue

18. Ultramarine Blue

19. Cobalt Blue

20. Violet (Dioxazine Purple)

21. Ivory Black

22. VanDyke Brown

25% Raw umber, 25% burnt sienna, and 50% black make a perfect neutral, that you can make lighter or darker with white.

As far as a medium when you are painting, I personally use Walnut oil, because it’s so environmentally healthy you could theoretically eat it and be fine.  However, the traditional method is to use linseed oil or poppy oil to mix with the paint to make it more buttery.  Poppy oil doesn’t yellow as much as linseed oil, however.

Either way you go, you DO NOT need to use an oil at this point while doing the traditional Ebauche (underpainting).  If you use too much oil with your paint at this point, then in subsequent layers, your paint will bead up.  When doing the Ebauche, use paint thinner to thin the paint, or an odorless turpenoid (natural substitute for turpentine).

When beginning painting the Ebauche, keep in mind that it is to get the overall general effect of the painting, with colors, values and feel of the work.  Don’t lose your drawing at this stage.  You can start correcting your drawing if needed.  When you paint a dark over a light, you get a chromatic rise–this is what happens when you glaze.  So overall, your ebauche should be a little lighter in value than what you want your painting to look like at the end, if you’d like to glaze over it.

Start painting the ebauche with the lights, the highest in chroma and value (for instance, typically the nose and forhead), and go darker in value and lower in chroma in the shadow from there.

Mix up a separate mixture for the shadows, and use a separate brush to keep the painting as clean as possible.

Also, mix up a separate mixture for the hair.

Protect the hight value, high chroma parts of the painting!  Get all the lights and darks established before going into detail.  For example, do a section on the forehead, side of cheek and shadow and hair, then do the rest of the face, using those sections as keys of light or darkness on the form.

Sometimes, when two complementary colors are set next to each other, they both appear brighter.  This is a similar optical effect to simultaneous contrast.  Don’t let your eyes deieve you!

Think again of sculpting, same as the drawing!  You want the picture to leap out of the canvas into life.

The legendary William Adolphe Bouguereau painted in for layers, and this was the first.  Only three more to go!  Below, check out his unfinished painting, where you can clearly see the ebauche stage showing through.

Unfinished painting by Bouguereau

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How to Paint Like the Masters, Part 5: Advice on Rendering Details in Drawing

23 Monday Jan 2012

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"Antique" by Megan Byrne, Angel Academy of Art

While I was taking this workshop at GCA, I was ready to be done with drawing at this point.  I wanted to get to the fun part…painting!  There’s something so freeing and satisfying about the brush tip making marks on your canvas, and the ability to manipulate it.  However, I disciplined myself to stay on task one more day, and was surprised at how much my drawing developed in just one day of adding details.

As you work on rendering the correct values for the shadow shapes, remember that there should never be a harsh line.

At this point, you’re allowed to think about reflected light, like the kind you may see underneath the chin, or on the side of the nose, or above the eyes right below the eyebrows.  Reflected light helps support the volume you already created with your lights and darks.  Once you pass the terminator (the point where the form turns away completely from the light), all light in the shadow comes from reflected light.  This is particularly helpful to know if painting, when the reflected light may be a different color tint than the direct form light (for instance, the form light may be coming from a lamp, and the reflected light is a natural light from a window.  In that case the reflected light would be blueish, and the form light more yellow.  But I’m getting ahead of myself 🙂 )  Back to drawing!

"Maria" Final stage drawing, graphite on paper, by Jessica Libor 2011

You shouldn’t have as much information such as details and variation in value in the shadows as you do in the light.  Put in LESS reflected light than you want to.  You have to make sacrifices as an artist.  Model twenty percent of what you want to in the shadows!  It’s all about self control.  Resist the urge to exaggerate favorite details such as eyelashes.

Layer from softer pencils to harder.  The harder the pencil, the more light and precise you will be.  Compare every value.  Ask yourself, should this plane be lighter than this plane?

When rendering hair, think of it as a shining object, a single thing, not the millions of hair strands that it is.  When seen in light, it functions like a satin ribbon.   The hightlight actually runs in perpendicular to the way hair grows.  Notice the hair in the piece below.

Study of a New York Woman, by Graydon Parrish

How to Paint Like the Masters, Part 4: The Rendering Continues

23 Monday Jan 2012

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To continue our journey towards a beautiful painting, we begin where we left off, while still rendering a drawing and getting the values correct.  Again, remember that with every finished drawing, painting in the correct value scale becomes easier.  Before we dive in again, I wanted to share with you some of the most inspiring drawings in a classical manner that I’ve seen.  Let these motivate you to continue!  Skill comes through correct instruction, desire, and a little bit of natural inclination.

Serena, by Jacob Collins, 2004

Inbal, by Joshua LaRock, 12"x14", 2007

As you are looking back and forth from the model to your paper, don’t worry about the midtones right now, they will figure themselves out.  Look at the shapes that the dark and light create.  Remember that you can’t create form by COPYING values, because our value range as artists is more limited than in real life.  You must compress the values to create something with sculptural integrity–like a block of marble.  Think about making it an experience of volume on the page.  Take big swaths with the chisel of your pencil.  When you do start to think about midtones, tread lightly!  The dark light is turning with the form until it kisses the shadow.  Every form goes through the same gradation of lights and darks.  It’s just how fast it goes through all the gradations.  In the light, the value changes are less than you think they should be.  Hairlines are a soft transition from skin tones.  If by the end of this drawing session, the form isn’t round enough, then the shadows need to be darker and the form light lighter.

Drawing by Steven Assael

How to Paint Like the Masters, Part 3: Drawing and Rendering

20 Friday Jan 2012

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In this post, we’ll make the leap from just drawing in contours and lines to actually rendering.  At this stage, you should have a very technically correct line drawing of the model in front of you.  It may be a bit smudged and messy from erasing multiple times and retracing over lines, so you may want to enlarge your sketch onto another sheet of more high quality drawing paper.

The teacher transferring his drawing, 2011

The rendering stage of the drawing is completely optional in the painting process, although it was very helpful to me in learning more about value and contrast, something I’ve always struggled with.  This post may get a little technical.  If you have trouble following, read over it again, or feel free to send me a message if you’re having trouble understanding.  I’ll explain it as best I can.

If you’d like to do the finished drawing, now is the time to make a photocopy enlargement of your drawing.  Once you have it the size you’d like, turn the photocopy over, and sprinkle or rub graphite onto the back of the photocopy.  Place the photocopy face up on the sheet of nice drawing paper, and trace over the lines you worked so hard for.  Remove the photocopy, and hooray!  A perfect, clean line drawing on pristine paper.

While you are transferring, now would be a good time to also transfer the line drawing onto your canvas.  For best results, use oil primed linen, either stretched on stretcher bars or mounted on board.  Artboard, a wonderful brand of archival artist boards, is based out of New York and sells from the Art Students League of New York supply shop.  You can also order their oil primed belgian linen mounted on boards online, at Artboards.com.  These are the supplies I use for my own work, and it makes painting so much simpler and easier, with a beautiful, professional finish.  Also, I find the board mounted canvas much more durable than canvas mounted on stretcher bars.  I’ve ruined more than one painting by accidentally poking through the delicate canvas!

It’s important to use oil primed linen rather than acrylic primed canvas for your paintings, if you want them to be of archival quality.  Acrylic and oil don’t mix, so it’s not wise to build a whole oil painting on an acrylic base.

Natural Fiber Linen Panel mounted with Oil Primed Belgian Linen from ArtBoards

But back to drawing.  Once you have your newly clean fresh line drawing in front of you, look at the lines you’ve drawn, and back at the model.  The important thing is that the shadows are separate from the light.  Completely flatten the shadow as an excersise…leave out the details of anything in the shadow.  The details within the shadow are much more subtle than you think.  Ignore reflected light within shadows (such as in the neck area) for now.

We have as humans a limited range in painting and drawing as compared to real life values.  Therefore, your “scale” of light and dark will be more compressed and narrow than what you see in real life.  Because we are limited in scale values, DIMINISH the contrast that you see.

The more perpendicular a surface is to a light source, the brighter it is.  Form is all about the location of the object in perpendicularity.

Now, what about the tip of the nose, the light in her eye, the shine on her lip, the sheen to her hair?  That is called “Specular light”, or highlight.  The specular light moves with you as you move around the model, unlike form light, which stays static.  Try it.  As you move around the model, the highlights change, but the actual light on the model remains the same.

As you pick a value for your shadow, pick a dark value, but not the darkest dark.

Fill in the shadows you see, and ignore detail.

Unfinished sketch of Maria done by Joshua LaRock, 2011

As you are shading, keep this idea in mind that will try to decieve you.  Simultaneous contrast: it’s when a light object (your model, if against a dark background) is contrasted against a dark object, your brain wants to exaggerate the contrast.  Think I’m lying?  Check out this shadow illusion.

Ask yourself these two questions again and again as your draw and shade:

1. Which plane is most facing the light?  The form light is peaking at the place most facing the light, NOT the highlight.

2. Where is the highlight in relation to the lightest form light?  They may be in very different places.

Caravaggio, a famous Baroque painter from Italy, was a master at using subtle contrast to bring out the fullness of the flesh on human form.  Look at the exquisite subtlety in the changes in skin tone and value in the painting of his below.

Baccus by Caravaggio, 1597

Don’t think about copying the exact values–it’s impossible.  Think about creating an object with the same scultpural integrity as the object you are representing.  It may help you to make a mental hierarchy of the brights, and a mental hierarchy of the darkest lights.  Again, keep the actual shadow all one shade for now.

Keep in mind that the larger forms are more important than the smaller forms.  And don’t give up!  The results are worth the work, I promise!