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Richard's Blog
Hello,
I intend to use this thread to document my progress in adapting Mark's method to my work. I am halfway through my first painting using this method (unfortunately I didn't think to take photos at earlier stages). I want to document some of the things that worked and some that didn't so I can refer back to this and try to improve in the future. I hope it's also interesting for some of you as well
I intend to use this thread to document my progress in adapting Mark's method to my work. I am halfway through my first painting using this method (unfortunately I didn't think to take photos at earlier stages). I want to document some of the things that worked and some that didn't so I can refer back to this and try to improve in the future. I hope it's also interesting for some of you as well
Comments
I live in a small house with my wife and our 18 month old daughter, and we simply do not have the room for a proper studio. I also do not want to use any kind of thinners for oils that could be dangerous to our daughter. I live in England so I can't order (or afford) the Geneva paints.
So.. acrylics. I really like using them apart from the incredibly quick drying time.
This is a problem when trying to use the step approach as I won't be working wet on wet, but effectively wet on dry. Even though Mark says no blending at first it's inevitable that the edges of steps will be blended to some extent in Oils, but this won't happen in acrylics and so I will have hard edges.
I also can't really paint out the steps on a palette in advance as even on a stay wet palette, thin layers of acrylic can dry (as I've discovered!) on the palette.
However I have a few things to offset these disadvantages. First of all as well as painting, I also do computer programming and pixel art on the computer. So I have written a program which allows me to show the steps from an image. The hue and chroma are preserved (tone in Mark's terminology), whilst the value is fitted into a step range. I'm using this program to find the areas to paint for the steps more easily. I'm going to have to use more steps in some areas to make it easier to avoid too hard edges.
Check out Atelier Interactive acrylics- they have a much longer open time, and can be reactivated.
It is possible to work with oils without solvent, many people do.
I've seen the oil paint range produced by Winsor & Newton that is Water Mixable, so no solvents required, but they got mixed reviews online. Is that the kind of paint you were referring to?
Winsor & Newton - Professional Acrylic (Artist grade)
Winsor & Newton - Galeria (Student grade)
Dalor & Rowney - Cryla (Artist grade)
Dalor & Rowney - System 3 (Artist grade)
I bought Professional Acrylic tubes (as they are supposed to stay dryer longer and have no colour shift from wet to dry). The colours are based on Mark's 5 paint method:
Titanium White PW6
Ultramarine PB29
Perylene Maroon PR179
Cadmium Yellow Light PY35
Burnt Umber PBr7
I substituted Alizarin Crimson (no longer available as a pure hue due to lightfastness issues) with Perylene Maroon, based on the recommendation from the Handprint website on pigments.
I also have some others 'power' colours as well if needed.
What I didn't appreciate from watching Mark's videos and trying acrylic versions myself is just how much more opaque the oil colours are. What doesn't help is that the Ultramarine, Perylene Maroon and Burnt Umber are Transparent colours. Even the Cadmium Yellow (like other yellow pigments) isn't particularly opaque to me.
So what I learnt is that I can't cover the background colour I've painted on the canvas with a single layer of paint. I tried to counteract that a little by using a mid-grey instead of a light-brown to try to remove any colour bias. But this just served to desaturate the colours and make things a little more blue tinted.
This is with artist grade quality paint, so painting small details in one go isn't going to work. I've had to go over the same areas a few times and that's meant that painted areas lose detail a bit with every layer.
For my next painting I'm going to try to block in the areas of the canvas with a close base colour so that there is not such a difference between the canvas colour (or undepainting in this case) and the detail work. To do this I'll use my program to find the basic areas and the correct values and tones and then block them in.
If they work ok for me I'll try those, if not I'll use them for underpainting instead to save the more expensive paint. I've already done some strictly opaque based tests which I'll post as well.
Thanks to Boudicca I now have info about the Atelier interactive acrylics which I might well try out as well.
http://retroidea.com/painting/opaque_testing.jpg
Each line of paint is divided into three sections, the first has one coat, the second part two coats, and the last section has three coats of paint - all applied when the previous layer was dry.
Some things I learnt:
- Professional Acrylic has a satin finish, all the others have a matte finish. Something to be aware of if using a combination of these brands.
- I haven't got a dark red as much as Perylene Maroon in the student ranges here. Need to try to find one to test. The Cadmium Red hues in the student ranges are actually Napthol Red and seem a little more opaque that the artist range.
- As expected Cadmium yellow in Professional Acrylic is the most opaque of the yellows tested. Followed by Azo Yellow Medium from the Professional Acrylic range. However in terms of opacity there isn't much difference between the Lemon Yellow in the Artist quality paints, and in the two student ranges.
- Ultramarine in the artist range is a little better in opacity than the two student ranges, but there is not much in it. The 3 Hue versions of blue painted are mixs containing white and/or black and so are much more opaque
- Burnt umber in the artist range is again a little better in opacity than the two student ranges. However like Ultramarine these pigments are transparent, so not much difference. The burnt sienna opaque is not as opaque in one coat as I expected, but with two or three coats does become nicely opaque.
- Mars black in the professional acrylic range is the darkest valued black, followed by the system 3 black and then the galeria black. However the system 3 black has a satin finish and so in some lighting conditions appears more grey and shiny than the galeria version. For an unvarnished version the galeria is probably the better choice as although lighter in value it's totally matte.
- Titanium white in the System 3 series seems much more opaque than both the galeria AND the professional acrylic range! This was a big surprise to me, and not sure why it's better than the artist quality paint.
That's my thoughts documented for future works, it might prove useful if any of you use acrylics as well
I've been reading online and seen a few people review both the Golden Open and the Atelier Interactive ones. Some people prefer one, and some the other, and some neither! As always I'll have to try a tube or two and see what I think personally.
Instead, being not so clever as I should have been I launched in to one of my favourite photos of my friend's daughter. Some background first though, the original photo was very dark and was facebook quality (i.e. a smallish size and low quality JPEG). I boosted the lighting / expose as best I could, but I realise this made the whites blown out and the darks too dark.
However I really like the pose, and the way the muted colours are offset by the cyan blue in the background and the pink in her hair ribbon. I find my eye is drawn from the cyan blue, to the pink, and then to her face.
Here is the photo:
So I decided to paint this photo on this mini-canvas as a surprise gift to my friend of her daughter. This also gave me the opportunity to try out Acrylics for the first time (always used watercolours previously) and the small size made it easy to paint in the evenings with a one year old safely in bed.
Here is the final painting which was a challenge to work at that size (I normally work much bigger)
After that I stumbled on this website and thought I'd try to do a much larger version of this picture again using the new method and see how it went.
You can see how with the increase in steps the picture starts to look more like the photo.
You can see the change in hue and chroma (especially in the area where her cheek reddens and then shifts towards yellow near her neck).
The histogram now shows just the colours used in this step and as the value has been fixed in the step, we have hue in the x axis and saturation in the y axis.
This was a mistake, and what I had failed to appreciate is that the darkest black available in pigments is considerably lighter than a black in real life, and even from a monitor. It turned out I was just making a few extra steps of very dark black colours that I couldn't really mix.
The second mistake was that I was rounded the values down (I.e. 15->8, instead of 15->16). I should have rounded the values up as the titanium white is a much higher white value than the black value (see information about this on handprint.com).
I reasoned that I would add these steps and then add the intermediate steps, so the 8 would become 16, and the 16 of the face would become 32.
I used laminated photos for colour matching as per Mark's guide.
With hindsight, it would have been easier to work one small step at a time, as it becomes harder to add in intermediate steps when you are working with so many steps already as the value differences become very small. This was compounded by the way acrylics dry so quickly and change in value, which made it hard to judge if a value and tone was right.
I always viewed this painting as an experiment, but one I'll like to salvage if it went a bit wrong if I could.
As I said earlier once I started to put in some larger step areas the colour become more grey/purplish due to the paints not being able to cover the background colour in one layer. I should probably have stopped, and redone the layer then, but I decided to keep going and see how it looked once the steps were all done.
This meant I had to go over them again to add another layer with a better tone, losing detail around the step edges as I went.
Then when I added intermediate steps I lost more detail, especially when I got some values and tones wrong and had to redo them.
At the moment though I think there are such a lot of errors and it's looking overworked that it might be easier to try again with a different version of Mark's method. I'm thinking of blending between larger steps over an under-painting rather than so many steps. I don't know if that will work any better, but pushing myself by experimenting is helping me learn..
I'm going to block in two layers of underpainting this time instead of a solid colour background. I'll use student grade paints for this, both to save the more expensive artist grade paints I have and to get a feel for how they feel and work in comparison to the artist line.
I have applied a largish median filter to the image to remove the fine details and show the broad areas and which tone and value they have in common. Then I've ran that image through my program and set it for 8 steps which I will use to create the underpainting. I'm going to make the underpainting a bit lighter than the real colours as Acrylics tend to dry darker I'm going to see if that helps with the colour working. Oh I'm also going to try to colour match against a series of colour charts I created and had printed off.
Again, no idea if any of this is going to work, just experimenting! Better wish me luck!!
Here is the traced outlines for the underpainting areas on my table easel:
Looking good.
Denis
You are right that there isn't a lot of drawing and that's a rather mechanical method, but then the same could be said for Mark's method too.
Have you got any pictures of paintings you've done in acrylic using this method?
Here is a better photo of the start of blocking in the underpainting though:
As I'm not sure at all that this will work, I'm going to start the proper painting on the forehead and the lit side of her face and see if it works or not..
The experimentation continues!
The only thing I'm not sure about is that the Burnt Umber is made with PR101 (Red Iron Oxide) as well as PBk11 (Mars Black). All their earth colours seem to be based on PR101 or PY42 (Yellow Iron Oxide) and Mars Black, unlike the traditional PBr7 (Natural Iron Oxide). Still PR101 and PY42 are supposedly refinement on natural iron oxides and Burnt Umber using PBr7 is not an expensive pigment, so maybe it improves on the pigment in some way?
I've stained a canvas with pale umber (acrylics) and painted a few coats on the underside of a glass panel too. It's going to take a few more coats than with oils, and the pale umber is probably a bit too pale. We'll see how it goes.. it's certainly going to be strange working on glass for mixing!
NOTE: The manufacture of most iron oxide artists' paints, including those with traditional names such as "earth", "sienna", "umber" or "ochre", has changed from the use of natural iron oxide clays — designated by the generic color index names PBr7 or PY43 — to the use of synthetic iron oxide powders. Small supplies of artists' grade natural iron oxides continue to flow from mines in Europe and the Middle East, but by 2002 there were no longer any suppliers of natural iron oxide pigments registered with the Society of Dyer's and Colourists' (UK) Colour Index.
Many watercolors now labeled PBr7 or PY43 are actually made of mixed synthetic iron oxide pigments, not natural ores. In fact, iron oxides used in watercolor paints today include pigments formulated for use in wood or leather stains, or as plastic, ceramic or masonry colors, and are available in a very broad range of colors and grades. See for example the page "earth tones dry pigments" at the web site of Kama Art Materials (Montréal, Québec), the mineral and iron oxide pigments available at Sinopia Pigments (San Francisco, CA) or Kremer Pigments (New York, NY), and the pigment information pages at Société des ocres de France or their USA distributor, The Earth Pigments Company (Tucson, AZ).
The use of natural oxides has dwindled so much that in 2001 the SDC considered eliminating the color index names PBr7, PR102 and PY43 from the Colour Index, and reassigning these pigments to the color index names for synthetic brown (PBr6), red (PR101) or yellow (PY42) iron oxides. However, manufacturers lobbied to retain these color index names as convenient "color" designations and desirable marketing labels. In 2007, the SDC reaffirmed to me that they were still deliberating on the issue.
I was a bit hesitant about trying them out for some reason, my first impressions:
- Feels very strange to be squeezing the paint out onto glass.
- Starting to grab colour from the squeezed out paint was harder than I thought as the paint seemed to stick together more than acrylics, and being on glass was much slippier at first.
- No smell from the paints, maybe a very faint smell, but a lot less than actylics!
- Mixing colours is very sticky and not as easy as I thought (this is pure paint with no medium).
- Titanium white, where is your tinting power? :P Either I put too much of the other colours in or for some reason acrylic white tints more strongly.
- Applying first strokes, very opaque and good coverage (better than acrylics), but slightly ragged edges as so thick. Not fluid, (is the word 'stiff'?) to work with?
- I mixed two skin colours from a laminated photo, took a while to get them right as needed a lot of white.
- Paint wiped off easily with a wet cloth from the lamination.
- Keep looking at the paint expecting it to dry!
- Blending between areas of paint is soooo easy.
- Tried out non-toxic artisan water mixable thinner. Made the paint much smoother and more fluid to work with.Still felt like oils when applying to the canvas. Easier to spread over the canvas, some loss of opacity.
- Then tried out water as a thinner (some guides recommend only using water for cleaning brushes), seemed easy to mix in with the paint became much more fluid. Easy to do washes, felt more like watercolours than oils, and more transparent then using the thinner (although I may have used more water). Felt like it would dry quicker than using the thinner.
- Washing up the brushes in a pot of water - most of the pigment removed. I only needed a little soap and water to remove the rest.
- Easy to use, no smell!
So first impressions were a little bit disappointed when it seemed hard to mix and very thick, but then got a lot better. So far it seems to have more advantages than acrylics for meThe cobra range is supposed to be more buttery and smooth than other WMO brands.
All of these are with only a small amount of medium added:
The stand oil is every bit as thick and viscous as I've read and seen in Youtube videos. Surprisingly for me though the resulting paint when applied is more transparent than with the other two mediums.
The thinner works well and is transparent in colour. Like the other mediums it does make the paint more transparent as well, and it's still slightly 'scratchy' to pull the brush over the canvas.
Linseed oil seems to work similar to the thinner (which perhaps has linseed oil in it?) but being an oil it does make the brush glide more smoothly over the canvas. Overall I like this feel the best, but only concerned about the yellowing nature with pale colours. However if I've only using small amounts maybe it will work ok?
Not sure if it's possible to mix the oils together in some combination to make any kind of more effective medium as Mark has done. I'm a bit constrained in that I want to keep the water mixable nature in order to make it easy to clean up.
Any thoughts anyone?
It's going to take a while for me to get used to Oils compared to Acrylics. The feel is very different. This was done with a step method and then manual touching up of some area afterwards.
I'm still learning how to use oils and how to paint and I probably should have started with something easier. I also don't have much time at the moment to paint and feel like I am rushing things too much
Well, I'll post another progress picture once I have fixed some more colours.
I started to get a bit lost with all the steps so decided to work on less steps at first to get used to painting with oils and working on this picture, and then add in the in-between steps. I wasn't going to do this after the acrylic version, but due to the blend-ability of oils I think I can manage it.