Today I’m doing fur, and it’s easier than you might think. This dog is a dark grey so I paint it in black and then with varying amounts of white on my brush I flick in the fur, moving in the direction of the fur. I start with the fur that is furthest back/underneath and move forward. This will probably take three hours.
Painting a shaded object with a pattern can be difficult, especially if the pattern cannot be painted on over top. In this case the pattern is rather large and so I painted each section separately. To give the pillow shape and volume I started by putting in the shading, as seen in the first photo. Then I moved onto to each colour and did some adjustments with more shadows and highlights at the end.
I’m painting the couch cushion on this other commission I’ve been working on and I start by painting in the darkest places with pure black (first photo). Then I took this beautiful cobalt blue and blocked in the rest. Now I will use white mixed with blue to paint in the highlights and give the cushion its form. Oooh, how I love this blue!
This is more difficult than I thought it would be! I am putting in the grey stripes on the blanket now and I must space the lines properly and the width of each stripe must be equal to the others, in order to show contour of the blanket and the underlying couch. I think I wouldn’t do this again, if given the chance, as there is a lot of room for error here.
I painted this last summer and by December I noticed that the colour on the couch was fading! I had used a little set of paints given to me, so I took the offending paints and pitched them all in the trash. I stick to buying Winsor & Newton, although Gamblin and Van Gogh are quality paints too. I am repainting the couch now (you can see the right end has been redone) but it’s a good thing that I hadn’t already sold it!
Today I have done the green of the pillow by mixing my green from yellow ochre, cadmium yellow, and viridian green with my heavy medium comprised of 60% linseed oil/40% mineral spirits, so that I achieve a more viscous paint, or glaze (first photo). Then, I took a little bit of black and brushed it into the shadows, and white for the highlights. The black and white help give shape and form to the pillow. When this is dry in a couple of days, I will easily paint on the pattern as the underpainting shows through my glaze and will be my guideline.
I’m working on the blanket in the top right corner and I start by filling it all with pure white on a big brush and circling it in so that it’s not too thick in any one spot (first photo). Then I paint in the shadows in with a light grey (second photo), and finally I smooth it all with my fingers (third photo). Yesterday you may have been wondering why I painstakingly painted in all the lines on the blanket if I were going to paint it anyway, but it’s because I knew they would show through white and be my reference lines for the stripes.
My underpainting is dry and I’ve started to work on the furniture. I start on the things furthest in the distance, that being the wall in the top left corner, then the wicker couch (that you can only see a bit of here), then the white couch cushion with appropriate shadows smoothed in. What you cannot see here is that the painting spills over onto the edges – we plan to put it in a box-type frame and the edges will be visible.
For an underpainting I mix 60% mineral spirits/40% linseed oil with burnt umber on my palette and I take a fine brush and carefully draw it all on. There will be no skin in this painting, so I can be a little sloppier with my lines, in that none will show through the skin and I can always add a little more paint to cover them up. I am finishing a blanket here that has very fine lines and it is difficult to have in the correct correlation to one another, but I have decided to paint in the lines instead of painting it one solid colour because it will make for a more mesmerizing image.
I have two commissions lined up for the same client and although I haven’t laid paint to canvas yet, a lot of work has already gone into them. I have done two photo shoots, had the carpenter (who we suspect is a drug addict because he keeps weird hours and is hard to track down, but he does good work, so…) make the frames to my specifications, stretched the canvas, gessoed them, and drawn my reference grids. And here we go with the underpainting…
