Balance
12 x 16", Acrylic on Canvas
29 December 2007
On Christmas Day, 2007, I pulled out my acrylics after having them in storage for a long time. I started in on a couple of paintings, this being the one I was primarily focussed on.
It's been odd becoming reacquainted with mixing and paint handling, but my old compositional habits seemed to kick right in. I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing, but I'll let it be until I've gotten a little more refreshed on the technical skills.
I don't like the teal-ish background and it'll probably mostly (if not all) become the brighter blue. Compositionally, there's still some railroad tracks to fit in...and maybe some other things.
7 January 2008
I covered the teal with cerulean, and roughed in the bird on the left. The scales will return to the painting later.
13 January 2008
Everything was looking too flat, so I went more painterly on the fields and ground. I like having flat areas in my paintings, but I don't like it all to be flat.
14 January 2008
I liked the painterly feel of the fields so much that I decided in favor of similar brushwork in the clouds.
Oops...looks like I forgot to take the masking tape off before taking that photo. Here's one with the mask removed. I rarely use masks, but it seemed like the simple solution to getting the brushwork I wanted on the clouds while still having a smooth outline on the hole.
I like the whitish lip on the hole where the mask covered a little bit of cloud, so I'm going to leave that as it is.
22 January 2008
I've worked on this twice since the last entry. In one session, I flattened the awful-looking bird (taking it back to the underpainting state), put detail on the cobra, and brought forward the red elements. In the next, I sculpted the bird outline and painted in its markings. In both sessions, I put light glazes on the balance in the background.
Now I'm feeling that the bird's tail is too close to the cloud and it throws the composition off. I'm not sure about the look of the balance, and whether I'll leave it as a transparent glaze over the blue sky or whether I'll mix opaque colors for it. In the image here, the balance is showing up more than it does it normal viewing, because of the camera flash.
23 January 2008
I fixed up the problem with the bird's tail and cloud by trimming the cloud a bit. I also darkened the tail to get more contrast between it and the background. Other than that, my session was spent bringing the details of the pyramid in. It involved masking, painting, repainting, re-repainting, re-re-repainting, etc., and touch-up of the surrounding areas. I'm always somewhat amazed at how much time I can spend on a simple object when I'm working in a tight style (like on the pyramid), as opposed to a loose style (like on the clouds). It takes lots of fiddling back and forth with small brushes, precise strokes, and multiple paint mixes. It'd be easier if I worked larger.
I'm more and more happy with the way this painting is turning out, and it's getting near completion. I still have a branch to bring in (the white squiggles on the left side of the first version above were a branch), and the white path to the pyramid was supposed to become railroad tracks, and I need to figure out a treatment for that. I've also got a great idea for an additional element above the pyramid...
25 January 2008
I got in another good session on Balance today. I started with the branch for the bird to perch upon. Again I used tape to get a hard line. I just figured I'd go ahead and experiment more with masking on this painting being as I had already used it a couple of times. I still had to retouch to get a truly straight line as some paint got under the mask and the canvas texture made parts of the outline a bit bumpy.
After that I added some little knobby bits to the branch, and gave the bird a pair of legs. I tried to paint the legs with the side of a painting knife but I couldn't get the paint to behave properly that way, so I went back in with brushes.
Having finished that off, I turned my attention to the new element that I'm going to add. It consists of a little white blobby bit somewhere above the pyramid. I was worried about the shape and size and placement of it, and I didn't want to fool around painting and overpainting until I got something that worked...thick strokes of paint leave ridges in the surface of a painting, and I wanted to avoid those.
A storm hit my brain, and I came upon the expedient of painting the different variants of the object on masking tape, and then sticking the variants to the canvas to see which one I liked the best. This also allowed me to vary the position and orientation until I was comfortable.
Here's the painting, with three test objects painted onto the tape beside it. Being as I was placing the object mainly over the background, I didn't have to cut it out precisely; I just painted blue background around it and stuck a rectangular shape to the canvas.
And here's what it looks like with the variant I decided on stuck to the canvas. It turns out that this was the first variant I thought of, in the first position and orientation I thought of, so maybe I should just go with my instincts rather than mess with all these alternatives.
I painted the black dot on the shape after sticking it to the canvas.
After trying all the variants in different places and at different angles, and making my decision, I took that winning piece of tape and for reference, I put it on the canvas about an inch to the right of where it is above. Then I just repainted it in place on the canvas. I didn't take any photos of it after the session, but it looks pretty close to what you see above (if you squint a little, so you don't see the tape edges.)
27 January 2008
Today I detailed the train tracks, first laying in a base color, and then putting in the tracks with a 5/0 rigger (very small brush). That turned out more contrasty than I wanted, so I glazed it a few times. With the new white object above the pyramid, the cobra had lost some of its lustre, so I brightened it up a tad.
Then I signed it and called it done. Making this painting has been great fun, and it's given me ideas for several more paintings to follow.