Scott
Burdick
Oil Painting
Demonstration
painted 2002
Here's my initial drawing of Maria on a stretched, 40" by 30" piece of medium textured Clausens double oil primed linen. Because of the size of the painting and the fact that I wanted it to work out to a specific composition, I used some vine charcoal to carefully sketch this one out. By just taking a quick measurement of the head and figuring out how many units high Maria is from head to seat as well as wide, you can very easily assure yourself that you'll end up with exactly the composition you have in mind. I knew I wanted this to be a life-sized painting, so I worked out the units once the pose was decided on, even before stretching out my canvas.
The entire first session was spent on setting up the pose, fooling around with lights, stretching the canvas, and then drawing it out. I actually had a different idea initially, which consisted of Maria in a blue dress with her hair up and sitting profile in front of a window. After setting that one up, however, I just thought we'd try something different and ultimately decided to paint this setup instead. Often when working with a model from life the tendency is to simply plop the model down and rush into painting without spending enough time considering the setup. This has certainly been my greatest fault! To try and overcome this, I've been forcing myself to take an entire three hours the first day in just working on the pose and then the drawing. Take snapshots or do sketches as you go so you can look them over later, think about which works the best and then start fresh with your idea set and well considered the following day. Put as much thought and creativity into your setup and the lighting as you put into the actual painting itself. This is certainly one of the things I need to work on personally, so I'm saying it as much to remind myself as everyone else!
Now I can go to work on the face without worrying that the hands might run off the canvas later on. The photograph below was taken after the first session of actual painting (plus a little more after Maria had left for the day)-- about four or five hours of work, I think. The most important thing in this painting was to constantly squint at each value and compare them to the lightest light and darkest dark of the subject. To achieve the brightness of the orange glow on the right side of Maria's face, I needed to keep all the other values in her face quite a bit darker than you might make them if looking at them in isolation. The fact that much of the painting is still white canvas doesn't bother me since my decisions are being made while looking and comparing values on the model and on my palette, rather than when looking at my painting.
The next day when Maria returned, I fished off the face and hair and got to work on the clothing (a three hour session without any more work while she was gone). Notice how much darker I'm going than the white of the canvas. Again, if I weren't constantly comparing these values to that light orange on the side of Maria's face, I would certainly have painted the white shirt much too light a value. This is often difficult to realize when looking at a finished painting since there are rarely patches of pure white anywhere on a painting. I sometimes like to hold up a piece of white paper in front of a painting in a museum to give my eye a reference point of the true value a painter used on light areas. Try it sometimes and I think you'll be surprised.
Below is what the painting looked like after the fourth day of painting (another three hour session and maybe an hour or two of softening an edge here, noodling there, etc.). This is about as fast a 30" by 40" as I've done. It is a very simple composition, but sometimes those can be the best. Generally the paintings I do from life take me at least half the time of those done from photographs since all the values and colors are right there for me to copy, while in a photo I have to work hard to paint what it would look like from life rather than copying the incorrect values in the photo. Of course, not all poses or subjects can be held for four days so I won't be throwing out my camera yet!
"Maria With Braids" oil, 40" by 30" -- model, Maria Carroll. Here's the final painting -- it's easier to see in the photo below since I shot it with my more professional polarized/tungsten light setup, which gets rid of all the glare. Unfortunately, I have to rearrange my studio to set the lights and everything up for it, so I didn't shoot every stage with it, but at least you can see the process of doing a larger painting from life with this painting. The disadvantage of the polarizers is that it flattens things out a bit and you loose some of the feel of the thickness of the brush strokes.
Here's a couple of closer shots so you can see the details in the face and some of the brushwork.
In this close-up you can really see the subtle interplay of warm and cool strokes working together to create the flesh tones. Since most of the face was in shadow, I chose not to use extremely bright, primary colors because they would have competed too much with the brilliance of the orange light on the right of the face. Even when working in more subtle areas, you will still be using grayed versions of red, yellow and blue to create vibrant juxtapositions of color.
Here's me in my studio painting Maria along with my good friend, and great painter, Steve Childs, who joined me in painting Maria. You can check out Steve's work (and a demo he photographed of this model session) at his website http://stevechilds.com/ For this setup I'm using my overhead Sylvania 5000 (Design 50) florescent lights as the main light source, with a warm tungsten light off to Maria's right for the strip of orange light. I liked the color counterpoint using a cool and warm light in the same painting.
In this corner of my studio, you can see some of the photos I've printed out and taped up. This gives me time to look at and mull over some of the paintings I'm thinking about doing. Sometimes a photo might stay up there for a couple of years before I figure out how I might paint it. Some never get painted, while others are painted immediately after being printed. I'm standing on a gym matt that we bought from the YMCA when they were getting rid of old ones. Both Susan and I use two, 4' by 8' mats laid lengthwise (giving us a 16' little corridor to walk back and forth while painting). When you're standing all day painting, it makes an enormous difference!
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