Swampfox is right, of course.

OK, here’s one.

With my head needing to make a sharp return to the cognitive reality I inhabit for the purposes of paying the mortgage, it’s interesting to metacognitively watch the transition.

The process of trying to become a better artist is hugely exciting most of the time, but is accompanied by steady pain. I know that I’m my own worst critic, and that fear of this inner critic is what made me put the pencils down around age 12 and not pick them up again until 37, old enough and desperate enough not care anymore. I can never get that quarter-century back, so that lends a fresh urgency to everything I try to do now… the clock is ticking on my own mortality in a way I could never perceive before what there’s no avoiding confessing is at least a biological middle age (even if it doesn’t feel like one in any other sense).

As I was in the earlier stages of learning, it was like walking forward in a heavy fog. I couldn’t see very far ahead of me in terms of being able to perceive where I was headed and where I needed to go. This was before I started school, and before I gained real personal exposure to great painters. In school, I did start to get some concrete senses of the distances I was trying to traverse, and over the past year, I’ve been fortunate enough to study personally with some of the world’s best painters, in the fantasy / sci-fi world (through the Illustration Master Class), and more recently among the avant-guard of “classical realism” (for want of a better term) among the folks at rationalpainting.org, led by Graydon Parrish, whom I consider the best artist walking the planet today, and whom I have the incredible fortune of being able to study with personally at intervals that will never be close enough.

The effect of this proximity to ability that is so far beyond mine is a dizzying sensation of a sudden clearing of this thick fog, revealing an immense, planet-wide landscape before me that needs to be crossed, a journey that will take a lifetime. This is a wonderful thing. However, this renewed knowledge of the gulf between where I am and where I want to be is a kind of revisitation of the inner critic that shut down my 12-year-old self. I can’t look at my own work next to that of the artists I’ve studied with and see anything other than cringe-inducing indicators of painful amateurism, even after 5 years of serious study (when not at the day job at least). In engineering, bootstrapping yourself into new areas of knowledge isn’t hard once you’ve done it once: you figure out what you need to know, you gather your reference materials and set up a place to do exercises, and you go right after it in concrete, quantifiable steps until you’re there. Art doesn’t work that way. What you want to do can be in plain sight right in front of you, but the steps to get there can’t be enumerated in a checklist, procedural format. And so I press hard towards my destination, but my work still contains all of the marks of amateurism that I can see plainly, but still don’t seem able to discard.

It takes a lot of faith and courage to expose that work here. I know that the artists I study with and admire have done hundreds, if not thousands, of paintings over decades of work, and mine below is, if you count my homework from the past year, maybe my 15th painting overall (and maybe my 3rd or 4th if you don’t), and so it’s irrational and absurd to expect to suddenly leap to the levels of my instructors just because I’ve been exposed to their work close at hand and learned from them personally. But still, it’s hard not to be cowed by that ageless inner critic. I know the work below is filled with embarrassing sign after embarrassing sign of amateurism, despite the full weight of everything in me I could throw at it to try to make it good. I do have faith that continued effort will produce improvement over time. But this clearing of the fog, being able to see clearly into the immense distance I yearn to cross, often makes me feel very, very small.

My back is a painful tangle of frayed muscles after four days of standing tensely at an easel. The day job awaits. But when I get home, I’m busting out the paints and getting on with charting up my Munsell values and getting my color wheel done, and I have chroma spheres to finish, among about a dozen other pending things, and there’s long-pose figure drawing (FINALLY) on deck, and hopefully another round of study with Graydon to start preparing for.

Onwards.

And that’s a wrap.

Last night I was working towards the finish, and at around 11pm I wanted to work the profile a little more and see if I could improve the likeness at all; I wasn’t very happy with it. A tiny voice in my head said “don’t f**k with it. You’re too tired.” I didn’t listen, and set in to work, and by 2am I had just about ruined it. At this point I was leaning in with a 10×0 brush, looking at it and my reference through a magnifying glass, trying to make corrections to proportion and pigment color in microscopic amounts that were having huge effects on the image. It was monstrously frustrating and I wanted to put my head through the board. Overall I felt like a lot about the piece was working well, but without a decent face on the central figure, little else mattered, at that point at least.

One of my classmates pointed out a couple of problems with fresh eyes; the nose was slightly too small, which was making the proportion of the upper lip too large, which made her look like she was scowling. Also, I hadn’t modeled the brow line correctly or the planes of the skull as the zygomatic turns into the temporalis. I had deviated from my reference a bit and the shadows were wrong, and the light color was wrong, and it wasn’t working.

After five hours sleep, I attacked it again this morning, corrected the nose proportions and tried to get the right color for the lips, and it improved enough that I no longer wanted to throw it out the window, although I’m still not happy with it. Still, there it is. For now, at least.

Overall, I feel like I did the best I could with the time I had, did a lot better than last year (when I didn’t finish), and did have some successes with this one. I like the composition and its theme; I’m pretty happy with the chroma control and perspective, and the six hours I spent mixing the blues used in the sky and water were expensive given the constraints I was under on day five, and probably not tactically very smart in that sense, but I’m very happy with the colors I got, and I have plenty left over and tubed up for future paintings.

Faults I see include the face still not being right in a variety of ways, the drapery being pretty awful (and something I intend to focus on a lot in the coming months), the boat being kind of ordinary and not sitting quite right in terms of value on the water, and the tree above and behind her being pretty rudimentary. I think it’s worth revisiting all of this, and I might either work on it more or repaint it, but I need to get away from it for a little while first.

Overall it was another incredible week. Exhausting – I’m on about five straight days of six hours sleep, which I do not handle well anymore, and I still have a jar of oily brushes to clean before turning in tonight. And back to the day job immediately first thing in the morning. Gah. But I have lots of things to work on, and am looking forward to taking an even bigger swing at it next year.

I’ll write this up in more detail later. It’s 2:30 am. I’m not a kid anymore.

One more day. Today was spent mixing blues to correct the sky and water with, which took a lot of time but I’m happy with the results. Some improvising on rocks, and tomorrow it’s Vegetation Day. Have to put in trees in the foreground, the big limb above her going off the page (probably), and then make corrections to whatever looks wrong.

The best thing about this piece so far is that it still reads well from across the room, which means the values are good. I’m happy about that. There are some really astoundingly good pieces this year, but my goal is just to make sure I finish, which I didn’t last year. I want to be far enough along to show without feeling like I didn’t make it. No more lectures for me, I’m putting in 12 to 16 hours of painting tomorrow. And then dropping dead on Sunday.

It’s actually day 5 as I post this, but this was where I started yesterday, and where I am as of this morning. I’ve gotten my first official “It’s OK if you don’t finish” from an instructor (Boris). ARGH!

I know it’s more important to work well than to finish, but I was hoping to bring this to a much higher level of finish. I’ve got two more days, minus lecture time. We’ll see.

Finally got my sketch approved. Phew! Now we project it onto the board, pencil it in at full size, and then seal it down and get to painting.

(I changed the bird. Much better now.)

I’ll have 3 full days, plus whatever I can get done tonight underpainting-wise. I was really worrying this morning, but I feel a lot better now. Gawd.

Still working on revisions to the sketch… that’s basically two full days, or almost. I was hoping this would be done tonight, but it looks like I’ve got a little bit more still to do. Hopefully it’s almost there, and tomorrow I can get it enlarged, transferred to the painting surface, and get underway with an underpainting tomorrow night.

This is about the fourth version; there have been a LOT of changes. Many, many compositional changes to the background – in fact, the only thing that more or less hasn’t changed is the figure. At version 3 I had the wind blowing her hair out and billowing her drapery towards the middle of the picture, which filled up some space and looked nice, but it did take away from the strength of the stoic pose and soften her somewhat, and several of the instructors felt that her resolute stance was the strongest part of the piece and not something to give up, so I took it back out, agreeing.

There was also the very strong idea to have the raven flying away from her, and heading for the ship below. This sets up the backstory that whatever has occurred between them has taken place and is finished, and she is sending the bird away… presumably, I think, to bring the boat some bad news.

The island and farther landmass need value and vegetation before this will compositionally balance, and some of the issues (like the color of the water and what its value will do to the overall piece) will probably need to be worked out in paint. I’ll be leaning heavily on chroma control for this one, and lugging in my Munsell chips and pre-tubed colors and so forth. If I can get the underpainting (probably monochromatic umber) down by tomorrow night, that will give me three full days to paint, and I hope that will be enough. Most of what I’ll be doing here, I’ll be doing for the first time, so we’ll see what we end up with. I do like the piece so far, though, and I’m happy with the concept.

After a couple of hundred reference photos with a very patient model, and a month or so of kicking around ideas, here’s my preliminary sketch for the Illustration Master Class, starting tomorrow. This is the fairly open-ended “Lady of the Lake” theme.

In the Arthurian legend, as much of it as I’ve read at least, the Lady of the Lake is a shadowy background figure who lives underwater and whose main task seems to be to thrust a hand up out of the water as Arthur sails by and hand him Excalibur, which she has spent nine years crafting. I’d like to take a deeper look at that, and what I’m getting at here is a moment of decision; she has wrought the sword, but has not necessarily decided to fork it over to Arthur. At first I wanted to just have a scene of quiet contemplation, but I thought for this scene there needed to be a little action happening (since we’re mimicking the process of designing a book cover, which should sell books). So, she’s up out of the water, looking out over the lake, and Arthur’s boat is moored far below, waiting. As she considers what to do, she is interrupted by a raven, an omen of war and bloodshed, flying up at her from below.

That’s what I’m going for here, at least. We’ll see what the instructors say about it in tomorrow’s initial round of crits, and by the end of the week I’ll have an 18″ x 24″ oil painting which may or may not resemble this sketch.

…uh, so to speak.

So today, after weeks of preparation, I finally went back to my source image and mapped out the 6 or 7 basic fleshtones I was going to need, put a layer of linseed oil over the dry underpaintings, and set to work, putting tones down and trying to keep the upper and lower paintings in sync. There were a few problems.

First, I put down way too much linseed oil. A short while into the painting, I noticed drops forming and actually sliding down the painting’s surface. I had applied the oil with a brush, and thought I had controlled the quantity well, but obviously I didn’t. It made the paint watery and hard to continue to work. Next time: use a cloth, and use a lot less.

Second, I misread one of the key fleshtones, which was more or less the local value of 7R 7/3, and ended up putting down a value 8 for the local, on the cheek and most of the face, and it was far too pale as a result. Oops. I started to correct that.

Third, for this particular example, my easel is up as high as it can go, and the grisaille is at a comfortable height, but the verdaccio is down a lot lower than I’m comfortable working at, so I have to bend down and forward to reach it, and I’m not very good at doing that. The verdaccio didn’t get a fair shake in this context.

All of this was done just to try to sort out whether I want to do a grisaille or verdaccio underpainting next week, and right now I’m leaning towards grisaille. It greens the yellows a bit, but if I use less oil on the surface I should be able to work another layer of pigment into it, I’d think, and build it up as needed. The other option which I might take a quick stab at is direct painting onto a white surface, with no underpainting at all. Part of the point of working with Munsell in this way is that you pre-mix and have ready what you need before you start painting, and you do very little improvising on the canvas. If you set yourself up right, it should be doable. Anyway, it’s all for learning.

Here’s where I’m leaving it tonight; I’ll carry on a bit tomorrow, but I also have to get my preparatory sketch ready for the real thing. The tones are obviously very flat, and I want to investigate ways to make it look more natural. Plenty to do.