Painting Walkthrough/ Tutorial-Old Wound (Patreon)

In this video I break down the process of this painting into stages. Idea, Planning, Sketching/Underpainting, Grayscale painting, Color, and a little reminder that it's never too late to change your mind.

I started with the idea.

Sometimes I just start a painting without any thought. Trying to find something in the paint that speaks to me as I move along. That's my default way to do a painting.

But, For this one I started with an idea. I had done two mini paintings that I really liked, one for it's thematic elements and symbolism and one for it's composition, pose and character. I wanted to combine them and scale them up a little.

I planned it out

for the composition, I’m thinking in terms of a silhouette. How will the overall shape look on its own without value or color or any details? I played around in photo shop with this, even using the Bacchus painting to help me plot it out.

I've been using photoshop more and more as reference lately. Something about doing that always seemed...I don't know...Wrong about doing that. I resisted it. But I've found that when it comes to this kind of fantasy/surreal/whatever-you-wanna-call-it artwork, creating clear references to work from is actually very liberating.

I want to do a video specifically about this at some point.

I Toned the Paper and started Sketching

I toned the canvas with burnt Sienna. I do this because it gives everything a middle value and a warm tone.

I sketch out the shape I came up with in photoshop.

Then I have a little fun. Trying some drips, some scraping and wiping and ultimately land on the old Plastic Wrap trick to create an interesting texture that I like.

Then I start building up the underpainting with Burnt Umber, Burnt Sienna, and And Ivory Black, making some mistakes (or not mistakes, but things I'd do differently) along the way. I'll point them out.

Grayscale Painting

Next I start adding making a grayscale, taking my time to get the values and forms nice.

This is where I make the first mistake (Or not mistake, but thing that I'd do differently)

I made the shadows opaque dark grey, when I should have tried to retain their transparent warmness with the Burnt Umber.

Spoiler: To mitigate this I ended up going with cooler shadows and warmer highlights, rather than warmer shadows and cooler highlights.

As a general principle, you want to have that dynamic in a painting, warm shadows/ cool highlights or cool shadows/ warm highlights. It just creates pleasing tones to look at.

Color

I start with the brightest colors for the flowers knowing that I can make them less bright later if I want.

I think that red brings a painting to life.

Then I work out the Shadow/ Highlight dynamic with the Purple Shadow, Yellowish Highlights.

Some of the colors I used are:

Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Yellow Med., Napthol Red Med., Dioxazine Purple, Hookers Green, Bone Black (kind of like ivory black), Burnt Sienna, Burnt Umber, Payne's Gray (I think), And Titanium and Titan Buff White.

Wow that seems like a lot of color now that I spell it all out.

Finally I remember that It's never to late to start again

sometimes in a painting we notice something that we aren't feeling great about. Sometimes this happens deep into the painting. Sometimes it feels like we're stuck with that thing, and that we've spent too much time on this to make a big change.

I think you should fix it, or move on.

Fix it if you think it will make the painting better. The amount of time you've spent on a painting isn't a good reason not to change something, even something big.

Just don't do it how I did it in this video. Do a sketch of the painting and test your idea about how to change it, or put it in photoshop or procreate and play around with things you might think would fix it. Then go back to the painting.

Even on this painting, what I thought was an easy and straight forward fix ended up being a long dark road of pain. Okay it wasn't that bad, but it was needlessly difficult.

I'm happy with where it led me ultimately, I think it became more dynamic, and added character, but it could have taken less time to find the solution.

And that's that!