Painting the Glorious Revolution (Discworld fan art)

working on the background.



Transparent Indian Yellow looks green over the grey.  Awesome!  A little bit of pthalo blue mixed in for the stems and leaves.

The table is primarily transparent red iron oxide.

The cup I left almost as it is with a bit of phthalo blue... I think that's what it was... for a very thin glazing where the blue stripe is.  A bit of touching things up here and there to help colour reflect from the porcelain.  But mostly, I left the cup alone.

Let's see. Where were we.  Oh yes, the dreaded flowers.

I want to paint these because I'm really bad at painting clusters.  Paint a forest, I paint each tree, and to paint a tree, I paint each leaf... annoying.

I want to fall somewhere between realism and abstract and to do this, I need to get better at clusters.  And yet, this specific painting is all about realism-ish.  



I made the under painting quite textured here with the idea I could glaze.  It's not working.

Or, a different way if putting it, is I'm not getting the desired result.  Time to mix painting and glazing.

And for a week, I was absolutely chuffed!  Best painting ever!  Well, best ever done by me.  So far.

And after a week, my skills had improved enough that I was wholly unsatisfied with my painting...but just couldn't see why.  So I took it to class and got some feedback from the teacher.   It's difficult to get technical feedback from an adult class as most go there for an excuse to paint and aren't wired wrong in the brain like I am.  So the key is to get the teacher alone so they don't worry about hurting other feelings.

Anyways, here are my notes

Feedback from teacher

More time is the key ingredient to realism

Accurate values.  Example cup edge at right next to shadow.  Shadow looks darker because cup is too light.  White objects deceive more than most.

Egg, value change is really fast near the line.  Sometimes changing a whole 1 point (11 point muncel scale) in a a couple of mm.  

My brush strokes went with the egg.  Like drawing, looks better to have the lines/brush marks perpendicular to the shadow edge.  He had words like "against the form".

Cup. The paint layer is too inconsistent and detracts from the realism.  

Use medium to slower drying pigment.  
A. Because upper layer of painting
B. To give more time to focus on getting values right

...

My thoughts

Egg has too few colours.  I want to bring in some of the colours from elsewhere.  Egg was done first and fewer colours so it looks less connected to the remaining picture.

It might be good to do a few practice eggs before starting.

Maybe start with the cup?

That's great feedback.  I don't know how to paint, but it's very clear for next steps (or next try) for you!

I do think it's lovely as is, but I understand that it's not where you want to be.

Night Watch is one of my favorite Discworld novels.  I sometimes re-read Guards! Guards! and then Night Watch immediately after.  G!G! is the funny pastiche I think you might be looking for.  It's very early in the series, introducing a lot of characters for the first time, in very broad strokes.  NW is fascinating after everyone having grown and matured.

Should you ever decide to sell a copy, please let me know - this is a very sweet piece.

(edited: grammar)

Thanks!

I found some more notes I made for myself from about that time

Why chose these items?

It wasn't just about the night watch,  there was so many more things I could choose to represent the story better and look forward to next year's painting

The items I choose were also related to my painting deficiencies.

The cup is a smooth white object with strong value changes.  It's something all artist struggle with and I wanted to test myself against it.  I had thought it would be easy, but it still tricks me.

The egg is both 3 dimensional shape which is difficult to show.  This is why so many paint apples and pears for practice.  

A brown egg is also very close to skin colour.  Depending on the egg and the hen, they can represent many varieties of skin colour around the world.  Eggs are amazing!   I choose one that was closest to my own skin colour, because I kind of failed miserably when painting my first self portrait.

I suspect painting eggs would be the best practice for portrait painting.

And last, the cluster of flowers is a challenge I'm extremely unconfident with.  How to show a cluster without painting each individual petals?

A colour study of my egg.



The goal is to place the paint and not blend.  So it looks blocky.  It's also a timed study to see how far I can get in a hour.

I like doing studies in this tiny moleskine notebook I picked up free at a yard sale.  I don't know what variety this book is, but the pages are smooth and thick like index cards.  A layer or two of gesso works to get this ready for oil paint.  Add some calcite to the gesso for more tooth as the paper is almost polished smooth and it's hard to get the paint to stick.

So, I painted this in june, and here are my notes to myself

Observation colour study (better pics on camera)

Hansa yellow and pyrol red prob not needed.  Remember to put out far less pthalo blue rs.

What was to be a 1 hour study, was 1 hour mixing paint and 1 h painting.

Goal zero blending.   Put paint and leave it.

Colour mixing still needs work especially saturation near back of egg.

Line of shadow in wrong place still and wrong width

Aklyd medium limits total painting time to 3 hours before gets too gummy

Would naples yellow help?  Trans iron ox?

More egg study needed

And looking at it now, i wonder if "magic mix" would work better for the darks.  That's a black or brown mixed with transparent colours, usually ultramarine, Alizarin crimson, and indian yellow.  In this painting, it would be phthalo blue and quin. rose.  

I have a few more prep things to share, but I'm going to skip ahead to today as a bit of a teaser.

WHY am I so dissatisfied with my painting so far?

And I keep asking myself this.  Over and over.  What tangible quality explains this?  Or am I just being an artist?

The cup shows it best.

And I have taken a trick from DrawMixPaint and laminated one of my reference photos.  Instead of having to compare by eye, I can test my colour mixing by touching a small amount of paint on the laminated image.  If it blends in, like this one, then I got it right.



Hard to see, isn't it?

Now I take that exact same paint and put it in the same place on my painting to see how close I got on my colour pass.



Yep.

That.

I haven't taken the paint off the left image yet, there is no glare to show you where it is.

For this painting, I want a degree of realism much greater than I have achieved so far.  It's not that the first pass was bad.  It has a kind of charm.  The dissatisfaction comes from it not matching my goals...yet.

Redd Hudson wrote:
Long live the Clack.

GNU