Filed under: Misc
Duster:
Because Ensei made her amazing how-many-posts-in-a-roll so I figure I must do something soon. Her last post is “Canvas”, so might as well do a post on my real-life painting lesson in 8 steps!
— Caution. The following post may contain harmful material to real painters’ eyes. —
1. All the sudden I picked a theme– the plum blossom. Not sure if it’s because of the sudden craving for the most common yet boring combination of the color scheme (red, white, and black) or because of I saw a beautiful calligraphy drawing of it, it came to my head suddenly. Mom’s office needs something more lively. Her dark corner of the room/empty wall is a good place to put something like a blossom. So, the feeling of curiosity of the theme is kept in mind.
2. Research. If you can’t find something around you then… look up the internet. Google is an amazing search engine. If you know other place that is better, please leave a message! I am not a word-interest person, therefore my eyes only track the visual aspects. Hence my bad taste in words. If you don’t know what I mean, then enter this site, and look only at the two centered images, and close it; that is my process of research.
3. Sketch the subject. When it comes to painting I never sketch a lot, because the feel of the brush is different from the feel of the pen. Thus, I don’t think sketching completely in pencil works that much…
So they tends to be very small. This one is smaller than an inch, and that’s all the sketches.
4. Sketch the composition. I like to do this on the little notebook that follows me around. Composition is the bone to everything. I refer back to it a lot when actually doing the painting. This will keep going until I reach to something that is suitable. There are 9 of them in total, but right now only showing 4.
In the end I choose this one.
Those sketches are a little bigger than the sketch in #3.
5. Assemble the equipments. They have been sleeping in my toolbox for more than an year already. Dig them out and observe their condition. Oh, forgot to mention, because my lack of rice paper stock so the painting will be on canvas instead, and the medium will be oil paint. Small brushes are, obviously, oil brushes with acrylic residue (?) on the fur… do not know what animal do they made from. Size 16 and less. The carpenter brush is brought for a dollar, 2 inches wide. That was suppose to be used with the grounds for printmaking. But it has many twin brothers and sisters, so what’s the harm?
Other than that: a cheap sponge, quiet a fine-quality piece of a paper towel, some newspapers for cover up my Ikea desk, a plate, and the oil paints (and they have a very very very tight caps).
This, is the oil. I don’t know what they called precisely but this is the oil in place for water. They can be resued.
Finally, a canvas, brought it on sale at Michaels. A canvas is nice, everything about it is great only until someone started to put paint on it. This one is about 30″ x 40″. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it’s too light and too thin….
Also notice a big rectangular shadow behind the canvas? That’s a board to support it because the easel is too small. And that’s the biggest size I could find, but it’s still smaller…
6. Start! No pencil sketches. Just use the brush and sketch. First with the line:
Then add flower:
Then I ran out of the color scheme.
7. Cheat. My life isn’t so colorful, most of the people know that from the color I picked for my clothes. My sense of color is buried in darkness, so I need to have a color-theme reference for every project. It doesn’t matter what is it. This time I choose this as my reference:
damn it.
8. Then the rest just go with the flow, this concludes my painting lesson for the day! This painting is not complete yet, this is a photo on the current stage. It looks more like a skin with a cut through and blood pops out right now. I’ll put up the final version when it’s done.
