Over the last few days I have been working on a painting of my crow character, in between working, eating, sleeping, dvd watching, internet surfing, and varied-and-sundry other tasks. Here is my progression so far...
1.) Initial sketches: the idea was simple- a crow playing a sax under a streetlamp.
The difficult task was deciding how to stage and frame the scene, so I scribbled down a couple different ideas and chose the one i liked best.
2.) The first draft: after choosing the version that worked best, I drew it out on a 9" x 12" sheet of paper, and inked it in. I chose to draw boards across the window of the pawn shop because the stuff in the window was too distracting in the background. Unfortunately, after inking, I realized the crow was a bit "off-model."
3.) Photoshop!After scanning the picture into my computer, I used Photoshop to erase the unwanted parts of the picture; not only the crow, but some water smudges from running through the rain to the house with the picture in hand. Then I printed it onto a new sheet of acrylic painting paper.
4.) Second Draft. after printing out the photoshop-corrected first draft, i drew in a more satisfactory version of the crow character.
5.) Commence Painting! After some additional touch-up on the crow's face, I spread a thin layer of white paint over the entire drawing so the ink was not so dark, and then filled in some flat gray on the walls of the building. The street (which I guess is supposed to be some kind of cobbled stone street, like in the central square of an older city) I painted a reddish brown undercoat, then with a dry brush dabbed in the high and low light colors- a yellowish white mixed into the initial color served as the light, and a black mixed with the reddish brown for the shadows. a slight edge of light & dark on each block helped to separate them from one another.
6.) More of the same. I used a similar technique to color the sidewalk, again mixing in a yellowish white for the light color, to reflect the glow that comes from the primary light source, the street light.
Stay tuned, and don't touch that scrollbutton! I've got a lot more work to do before this painting is done...I'll share more later!
~the Jerk
Why, you ask, is it taking me so long to paint such a simple (...and small) picture?
Because where most painters have oodles and oodles of tubes and cakes and tubs and buckets and bottles of paint, with every color of the rainbow and the dirt, I have only 5 colors: black, white, red, blue, and yellow. Therefore, before I can put brush to paper (or canvas, linen, wood, tile, etc.) I have to mix up the colors I want first. And since I have a very small pallet, I usually only mix enough colors for a couples areas of the painting at a time; Usually, I pick an object, find the right color (this is kind of like playing with mud sometimes- add water, stir, add more dirt, trying to find the perfect blend) then break it off into several dishes to lighten, darken, or mix with another color for highlights, shadows, and reflections.
So in between sessions, I stare at the thing for a while trying to decide where to go next and how I want to approach an area of the painting.
