The magic point...

 

Hello again!  I have been incredibly busy painting pet portraits for holiday gifts.  While it’s awesome to have so much work, it can also be a little stressful.  Especially when you’re on the road.

For example, I have found out that the iphone photo of the little deceased Australian Shepherd that I’m working from has plumbed new depths of fuzziness.  No matter how much I use PhotoShop to try to straighten things out, there are THINGS ABOUT THIS DOG’S FACE THAT I CANNOT SEE…

Although maybe it’s my middle-aged eyes.  Or the fact that I have been painting in iffily-lit hotel rooms and guest rooms across the Southwest for the past two weeks, and not in my usual studio.  Where, I should add, I can blow up the photos to 20 times their ordinary size.

Anyhow, I’ve been VERRRY critical of my work lately.  But recently on some of these pieces, I’ve hit the MAGIC POINT. (example above...)

What, you may ask, is the magic point?

Let me explain it to you like this.

I have this piece of canvas.  I take these crudely-wrapped bundles of bristles and I push around gobs of pigment to form different shapes on the canvas.  The shapes eventually start to take the shape of something vaguely recognizeable, like a raccoon, maybe, or (often, actually) a hedgehog.

Eventually the shapes, after I have done enough pushing and pulling, will get to the point where the pigments roughly approximate something like a cat.  Or a dog.  So then I have to keep going.

But it’s painfully clear (ha ha, the first time, I wrote this PAINTfully clear, which is totally a Freudian slip) that this is just a load of pigment on a canvas in some organic shapes.  It’s just paint.  It’s got no life.

But if I keep going, I know I’ll get rewarded.

So I keep messing around with this stuff, on and on, well past the point where a sane person would have thrown in the towel and headed to the neighborhood bar.

And then I reach the magic point.

All of a sudden, what was a bunch of random smears of paint suddenly coalesces.  I look down at what I’ve been doing, and say, 

“Ah, Fluffy, HELLO!  THERE you are!”

And they are.  There’s some essence of the animal’s spirit right there in the paint.  And I, being too stubborn or stupid to quit, have somehow captured it.

That’s the magic point.  That’s when I know I’m on the road out.  The painting may not be FINISHED (in fact, usually it ISN’T), but from that point on out, my job is mainly to NOT lose the spirit or cover it up by stupidly or carelessly slopping more paint on it.

At least that’s the way I think about it. 

But maybe I have been breathing too many paint fumes!

Trampoline no more!

Ahhhh...I FEEL MUCH BETTER NOW!

Here's the follow-up to the piece that was giving me fits two blog entries ago or so (For more information and a much CRAZIER version, please reference my blog titled "A Trampoline for Your Eyes").  Basically, I toned down the background with several translucent coats of grey/green.  Whew!  It's amazing what just a few coats of paint will do!

And now I'm sort of kicking myself for WAITING TWO WEEKS to do that!  I think I was a little afraid that it wouldn't work and that I would be out ALL the labor and time it took to lay in that tartan pattern!

Oh, well.  The way out is the way through.  I just had to grit my teeth and do it!  And the portrait is clearly all about the DOG now, instead of being about the giant red SQUARES and then the green and then sort of the dog and then...WHY do I suddenly have a craving for Walker's shortbread and a headache???

Okay, back to work!  I have a bunch more in the way of holiday portraits to work on...and travel plans in the offing as well!  So if I don't get back to another entry before the holidays, please have a happy thanksgiving!

A trampoline for your eyes...

The image is of a client's piece that's in progress that is GIVING ME A TREMENDOUS HEADACHE.

It's kind of a secret because the piece will be a surprise Christmas gift, but I figured, "Hey, I only have about five blog followers and I'm not using names here."  So please do NOT RAT ME OUT or share this with anybody who has a Scottish Terrier until AFTER CHRISTMAS.

But I COULD USE YOUR HELP AND YOUR COMMENTS!

Anyhow, because the client has a Celtic heritage (no, the OTHER Celtics, they are NOT Boston basketball fans), I thought it would be BRILLIANT to incorporate their terrier with a tartan background that relates directly to their family.  So I did the research and found out what the tartan looked like.

Then I pitched it to the client along with a rough sketch.  They ALSO thought it would be brilliant!

So I went ahead with the painting.

And EVERY TIME I LOOK AT IT, I hate it.

HATE IT HATE IT HATE IT.

I have spent DAYS on that freaking plaid background, toning it down, bringing it back up, etc.

And what I have is like that silly Old Spice Commercial where the hunky, six-packed dude says, "Look at your boyfriend.  Now look at me...now look at your boyfriend..."

Although I think I encountered that first with the ad for "Puss in Boots" where Antonio Banderas' voice purrs out of Puss' mouth, "Look at your cat.  Now look at ME..."

But this version is more like:

• You look at one of the BIG RED SQUARES.
• Then you look at the dog.
• Then you look BACK at the BIG RED SQUARES.  

Boy, you think, those are big.
And red.
What was this piece supposed to be a painting of, I wonder?

• Then (maybe) you look back at the dog.  

Oh yeah...it's a dog portrait!

• Then it's back to those freaking red squares.  Or maybe one of the blue lines.
• Then ANOTHER piece of the background--maybe that IDIOTIC white and yellow line.
• Then you go lie down with a headache.  
• Or you go pick up a Magic Eye book, to give your OWN EYES A BREAK!

I called my friend, Ann, today (she is one of my most trusted artist friends), to try and get her critique on it, and, after I described it to her, she said,
"Oh, so it's like a trampoline for your eyes?"

And YES.

That is EXACTLY WHAT IT IS LIKE.

A TRAMPOLINE FOR YOUR EYES.
They bounce ALL OVER THE PLACE with this thing.

And it's supposed to be ABOUT THE DOG!

So I need to change that.  I've decided to bury it in the closet this weekend and take a look at it early next week with Ann, to see how to fix it.

From experience, I know that I'm smack-dab in the UGLY UNDERPAINTING PHASE.  And the only way out is through.

But I don't have to ENJOY it!  Grrrr....

If you have any insights, they are HUGELY APPRECIATED!  But I'm taking the weekend off from this guy!  Happy Friday!

...and the final product!

And here's the final product. You can see that I've gone in and lightened up the background with some nice, gauzy patches that are pretty evocative of the grass in the initial photograph. And I've blended in that whole reflection of the greenish light in the dog's ruff.

What I like about this portrait is that it's very realistic. It captures the dog's appearance and, I think, to some extent, his personality. And it still makes me wonder WHAT ON EARTH IS THAT DOG LOOKING AT?

(Even though I am the creator of THIS particular dog, so by rights, I SHOULD know).

At the same time, it's clear that THIS IS A PAINTING. There are nice places where the yellow and red underpainting shows through that adds to the painting. I like that. I like that this piece is very "painterly" (which was a big word my art professors used, probably to confuse me). So to keep the confusion from spreading, here are the definitions of "painterly" from dictionary.com:

paint·er·lyAdjective/ˈpāntərlē/

1. Of or appropriate to a painter; artistic: "she has a painterly eye".

2. (of a painting or its style) Characterized by qualities of color, stroke, and texture rather than of line.

I'd say it's probably definition 2 that we're dealing with, but maybe it's both, in some ways.

And that's my whole process, in a nutshell! I have spared you all the moments of frustration, examples of profanity, and suicidal impulses in this series, but you have the basics!

That's it for today. Now I must go learn how to stretch canvas better. Currently my attempts at stretching canvases resemble those of a nonathletic five-year-old, and I have about 3 hours to polish my skills, since I have some giclee prints on canvas that I'm putting in some pet supply stores and veterinary offices this afternoon! So it's off to the staple gun and the canvas pliers and YouTube videos on how to fold the CORNERS. The corners are KILLING ME!

Painting process--ugly duckling stages...

So here you can see the ugly, seamy underbelly of paintings.

At least MY paintings. I know of a pet portrait artist who regularly shares photos of her paintings in process and they almost NEVER look this chaotic. However, she also only uses TWO coats of paint. In TOTAL.

That's kind of hilarious to me, since I often end up with up to 10 different layers of paint (maybe more) at different points on the canvas. It's just how I roll. My process might not be as EFFICIENT as this other artist's, but, to be honest, I VASTLY prefer the way my work turns out at the end.

Even though the trip along the way is filled with ugly, ugly versions of the painting. And sometimes I feel like "HOLY CRAP MAYBE I SHOULD BURN THIS TRAVESTY BECAUSE IT'S NEVER GOING TO EVOLVE INTO THE THING OF BEAUTY I'D IMAGINED IN MY PROBABLY DELUSIONAL MIND."

Anyhow, here are the "before" photos, just for your information.

When I start, I like to use a bright color for the underpainting. Right now I'm working on a portrait of a Boxer and I'm finding that the way the bright crimson underpainting glows through is really adding to the way the whole piece comes together at the end. Some of this is due to the way I use acrylics.

Acrylics, feel-wise, are this cool hybrid between watercolors and oils. Until they dry, they're water-soluble, which means you don't have to use nasty stuff like turpentine to clean your brushes. And, if you use acrylics straight out of the tube, they can go on nice and thick and opaque, like oils. But you can also THIN them with water--and then can apply them to the canvas in varying degrees of transparency.

So I use acrylics in BOTH of these ways -- in opaque layers and also many, many translucent layers to build up the image. And I find that a really POW color for underpainting, like the red I used under the shepherd's brownish parts, glows through all the other layers and gives the painting a depth that it wouldn't have, otherwise.

Or maybe it's all those OTHER layers that I use.

The second photo in this sequence is actually one of my little cat, Windy, who seems to be putting her pawprint of approval on the piece. But then again, she's a cat and, while I've heard that cats actually see in MORE colors than just black and white, I've also heard their color sense is EXTREMELY limited. So, although she gets to boss me around on all sorts of other matters, her opinion on when my painting is finished carries NO WEIGHT AT ALL. Because the piece is NOWHERE NEAR FINISHED.

The last photo (which, probably isn't showing UP as the last since Blogger has decided once again to thwart me and I can't figure out how to get images showing in the correct order) is the one of the shepherd partially blocked by my paintbox and palette. I put this photo in to show yet ANOTHER layer -- that of the greenish-yellow around the dog's neck. I realized that the photo had a nice glow on the dog's ruff of light reflected up from the grass. But my painting, up to that point, had lacked ENOUGH of that. So here I go again, backfilling and adding yet ANOTHER layer of paint, to capture that reflected light.

I'm surprised my paintings aren't about 3 inches THICK!

Final image in next post. It will look VERY DIFFERENT!

Painting process--photo selection & sketch

So here we go with the first part of the portrait process itself -- selecting the absolute best photo of your animal, and then my creation of a composition that will be interesting.

To illustrate, here are the first few images related to my painting, "Even three-legged shepherds dream of herding sheep."

I had taken a TON of photos from my morning in June at the Lucky Mutt Strut, to benefit Denver's MaxFund no-kill shelter. And a lot of them are usable as references for paintings. But I kept coming back to this photo of a lovely little red merle Australian Shepherd dog with three legs.

(No, you cannot TELL that the dog only has three legs from the photo, and, to be honest with you, it seemed like a bit of a sensitive point for the owner --although NOT, of course, for the dog. Dogs seem to be a lot less defensive than people about things like diversity and "challenges." I suppose when, as a species, you have such HUGE variety in terms of hair length and color and size, making distinctions based on these things stops being very meaningful to you. Maybe we, as humans, are just too much ALIKE to get there.

Although maybe I am imagining the whole defensiveness thing on the owner's part. It just seemed that when I asked if the dog was a rescue dog -- and since this was a walk to benefit shelter dogs and there were a LOT of rescue dogs around, many with all FOUR of their legs, so this didn't seem like an OUTRAGEOUS question to me--the owner got kind of huffy and said, "NO. No, he is NOT." And then she tried not to talk to me anymore. So I guess it was lucky that I had already gotten the shot.)

But again, I digress.

Anyhow, what I liked about this photo was the clarity of the shot, the dog's expression, the light, and the fact that I kept wondering WHAT ON EARTH WAS THAT DOG LOOKING AT? So I really wanted to capture that in my composition.

So on the right (or below--I am not sure, depending on your browser) you can see my first sketch on canvas. I already knew that I wanted a large piece for this painting, so I made the sketch on a 30" x 30" canvas. Because I was so fascinated about the dog's gaze, I kept that part of the composition and left a lot of blank space to the right of the dog (and, yes, that pesky human in the photo got cropped out).

I KNOW, all you students of composition--one of the first things they tell you is to LEAD the viewer INTO the painting...don't have things facing OUT of the painting, etc. etc. etc. All I can say is, after you've worked long enough, you know how to break the rules successfully. So I used THIS composition. And it works!

I reference photos extensively throughout the whole process, but at the sketching stage, I'm focusing on locations of eyes, ears, and noses--making sure that everything is correctly proportioned and located. I usually use PhotoShop tools or the "grid" approach (which has been used by just about every artist since Da Vinci) to make sure that my sketch has the correct anchor points at the right places. This ensures that the drawing is right and that I don't have to go through a whole lot of fundamental corrections as I paint!

Sometimes I don't do this, but inevitably I regret it. And, as you can see, what I come up with is a relatively rudimentary sketch--outlining the main parts of the animal, as you can see above. The next step is the REAL magic--making a painting that lives and breathes!

I'll get to that next week! Happy weekend! I am off to my brother's/dad's combined birthday party!