Issuu publication: Life Drawings

Open publication - Free publishing - More miketoddart

Issuu publication: Figurative Paintings

Another online publication, this time of my figurative oil paintings. I must say I'm impressed with Issuu.

Open publication - Free publishing - More oil paintings

Issuu publication of Still Life Paintings

I've been playing around with the Issuu online publication site. You can turn pdf documents into attractive presentations. For free! Here's one on my Still Life paintings.

Open publication - Free publishing - More still life

Stamford Life drawings

A couple of life drawings using brown Conte stick and smudging with finger, then putty rubber to pull back the lights.

Please support the 'save the Stamford Arts Centre bar' campaign. There's a petition and, even better, get down there and use it!

Step by step oil painting : Step 4

This is the final step, which includes glazing and finishing touches. To glaze the lemons I remembered that I had some Schmincke Mussini paint tubes. These oil paints include a resin and a large proportion of the colours are transparent or semi-transparent, making them ideal for glazing. I used Lemon Yellow, Translucent Yellow, Raw Sienna, and Translucent Golden Green, as well my standard Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Umber. To make the glazing medium I used Stand Oil mixed with Liquin Light Gel and Sansador thinner. I also glazed the fabric using Violet with a little Ultramarine. After glazing, I decided to use some Titanium white 'specks' to lift the highlights on the lemons and cloth. This is contrary to what I said earlier on about not using opaque over transparent layers, but this is art so there are no rules! Because this was applied wet-into-wet and delicately placed, it turned out OK. Final stages were to finish the details on the bowl, and then I added a bit more dark to the fabric creases. These final details make the difference if you are going for a trompe-l'oeil effect.

I think the painting is finished, but I tend to leave paintings somewhere conspicuous for a few days to see if something starts to bug me enough that I have to fix it. Overall I'm quite happy with it, but I think it needs some gold in the frame just to lift the edges a bit.

I've painted another picture at the same time as this (click to enlarge). Although simpler I think this is a bit more interesting, which is partly to do with the lower angle of view, and something else that gives this a more metaphysical aspect. Or that might just be me. I didn't originally plan to leave the fabric unglazed, but I liked the grey, so I left it. Vote for your favourite!

Now the paintings have to be left to dry before varnishing. At least 6 months is recommended, but I paint very thinly, so these should be OK to varnish a lot sooner. I will probably leave for a month before varnishing. A temporary varnish (e.g. re-touching varnish) can be used if they need to be exhibited before then.

Life drawing - Stamford

To keep you entertained until another thrilling painting step, I've posted a couple of drawings made at this week's life drawing 'class' in Stamford. It's not really a class as there's no teaching. These were graphite pencil on Ingres paper.

Step by step oil painting: Step 3

Step 3 in this case is working up details on the cloth and the dish (whilst waiting for the lemons to dry). Painting cloth is an exercise in tone. Get the tones correct and it will look like cloth. It's easier to find the tones using a greyscale underpainting like this, which will later be glazed. Start with a range of premixed tones on your pallette and simply 'look and put' the correct tones on the painting. For soft cloth the edges need to be blended. To get the effect of the fabric texture I used a stippling method with a lightly loaded dry brush. Details of the dish were worked up using a small brush. Drawing ovals is quite difficult, so I took a photo of the painting and uploaded this to the laptop. I overlaid the images to see where my drawing was out and then used this info to correct the drawing. I also gave the background a further coat of the burnt umber/ultramarine blue mix. The cloth needs to dry before glazing and further work is needed on the dish. Here's the current painting (click to zoom):

Step 3 Working up the cloth and dish details