a dream of a shadow

Still trying to get the hang of this oil painting stuff. Some say watercolor is harder, but having done both, idk, I find oil to be next-level. Different paints drying at different rates. Some colors drying glossy, others matte (and does one "oil out" or not if that happens?). Fat over lean. Mediums, solvents, what primer to use for your surface. Color mixing: I got away in watercolor with layering individual colors to get the hues and values I wanted, but in oil you can't do this; you have to mix everything bang on from the start.

The hardest part, imo, is that you can't hide your brushwork. OK, well, you can: you can blend everything out or paint with the tiniest brush known to man and achieve a hyperrealistic look, but I was going for a kind of brushy, John Singer Sargent-like look, which turns out to involve laying each brushstroke down over paint that is still wet (working "wet-in-wet" as painters call it) and not correcting the stroke afterwards.

Detail of facial area showing brushwork.

At most, you can soften some edges (going over the mark gently with a clean brush), and knowing which edges to do that for and which to leave alone is Its Own Thing. (Edge control is one of the biggest things separating really good from not-so-good realist work: the latter tends to leave everything sharp or to over-soften everything.) Trying to do more than that, however, will unavoidably make things worse, so if you get the stroke wrong, you have to scrape off what you did and try again. And when you're working into paint that's still wet, you have to know exactly how much paint to put on your brush, and what angle to hold your brush at when applying the next layer: otherwise it just won't take.

Now I understand why even a genius like Sargent spent four years training under the best portrait painter in Paris to master this style.

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Process pics + yapping:

STAGE ONE. The outlines of the head were roughly sketched in charcoal, then an abstract background was laid in using terre verte (a green natural earth pigment, the light green color) and viridian mixed with a touch of transparent red oxide (the dark green color), applied with a large flat brush. The background was done first to aid in accurate judging of the tones and values of the face, which is difficult to near impossible on a white canvas.

Some artists will paint a light wash of color over the entire canvas to begin, also in order to make the judging of colors/values easier. But since I was aiming to do this work alla prima, painting fresh layers on top of still-wet paint, I didn't want to contend with layering warm flesh tones over green. (An old Italian technique called verdaccio exists where an artist paints a portrait entirely in shades of green, establishing the correct values or contrasts between light and dark, before painting over the image in its final colors. This is supposed to lend the flesh tones greater vibrancy, especially if bits of the underpainting are left to show through. However, these artists would always have allowed the green underpainting to dry thoroughly before proceeding.)

STAGE TWO. A base of flesh pink (venetian red tinted with lead white) was laid over part of the face. The eye and nose area were then defined, and the tonality of other areas of skin varied with pinks, reds, and yellows.

A lot of portraitists would have done a first pass over all the major features, instead of completely finishing one area before moving on to the next. I have always found it natural to do the latter and to start with the eye region specifically: it serves as an anchor for the rest of the face, and if done properly, there will instantly be life, a human presence, in the canvas. That's a shot of confidence and a great source of motivation to continue.

STAGE THREE. When painting a subject with facial hair, as a rule, I first layer other colors underneath the area bordering on or to be covered by hair. Where Novak's hair is showing under his cap, too, I painted flesh tones beyond where the hairline would have begun. If I were to try to guess exactly where the skin ended and the hair began and painted up to there, I would get a hard boundary or even a tiny gap of white between skin and hair, which looks bad. Even in thick facial hair you can also have slivers of skin (or some other color) showing through: so layering is a must.

Note the red on the jawline: in the source photo, there was a strong reflection of red/orange light from the shirt Novak was wearing. After the hair is layered in, the secondary lighting will look natural.

STAGE FOUR. The facial hair was laid in over the mouth, chin and jawline. The hair in front of the ear and at the back of the head was painted, and the form of the neck at the nape further modeled with shading.

STAGE FIVE. The cap and shirt were painted. At this point, with all areas of the canvas worked to more or less a finished state (only the ear remained to be done), some flaws in the face and neck became noticeable. Some were small details, but the biggest issue was that the face and neck were too pale compared to the source photo, especially after the very intense orange/red of the shirt was incorporated.

Fortunately, I determined that repainting the whole face/neck would not be necessary. I did repaint the neck, because there were a couple of spots of wrong-colored facial hair that needed to be eliminated, but on the face I darkened the nose, eye socket, and cheek area, and that was enough to get the whole thing looking half a notch darker.

This took 14 hours over two days; I was hoping to finish it in one day (to paint alla prima is literally to "do it in one go"), but some areas, the cap and the shirt particularly, really threw me for a loop. (They look drop dead simple, but they're not! Or rather, painting something so simple-looking, and having the result look simple-looking, is anything but simple ... at least for an oil noob like me.)

But it's OK, I'm improving! My first head took four days, my second one (the one before this one) three ... so I guess my next one ought to be one day's work??

Shirt (creases upon creases)

lobster claws hands

When sharing our work, we artists tend to show just the final product, maybe snapshots of a few steps along the way. We tend not to show how things went wrong in the middle, if they did. (Trust me: they go wrong pretty often, at least for me.)

On this one, a lot of things went wrong, and the final result, while I like it now, was far enough away from what I had envisioned that I couldn't look at this piece for months after finishing it. For one: the skin tones were way too red. As in, my man Novak was a lobster being sous-vided on court. This was caused by a combination of things--light reflecting from the clay surface onto him; and my iPhone employing a setting called True Tone which supposedly "automatically adapt[s the] iPhone display based on ambient lighting conditions to make colors appear consistent in different environments." There was nothing to be done about the first: I have to draw what I see in the photo. But the second wreaked havoc. The phone boosted the saturation of the photo, probably while I was working late in the afternoon in declining light. Without it, I would not have gotten the colors this wrong. As it was, I was too focused drawing to step back and realize that his legs were, well, lobster-red. (Needless to say, after realizing my mistake, I went and deactivated True Tone for good.)

Fortunately, I was able to correct the legs so that they didn't quite look as sous-vided. But the clay surface was another matter. While on the rest of the drawing I used my workhorse Unisons, for the clay I was trying out a few sticks of Henri Roché pastels purchased from Paris during my Roland-Garros trip. The House of Roché was founded in 1720; they've been in business since, and they're currently a two-woman team who make, pack, and ship upwards of 2000 different colors of pastels sticks all by themselves. Degas used their pastels back in the day: 'nuff said. They also happen to be, by some margin, the most expensive ones on the market. €20 a stick, folks. By contrast, other professional grade pastels are around $3-$8 a stick.

Naturally, being curious to know what the fuss was all about, I went and bought some sticks in RG colors. I thought to do this drawing specifically to see how Rochés differed from what I had: I would use the Rochés just for the court surface. Well, I learned the difference--to the detriment of the drawing. I thought my Unisons (a top quality pastel, used by many professional pastellists, handmade in England) were vibrant, but next to the Rochés they looked dull and chalky. The Rochés glowed with their own light.

Problem is, the clay surface was supposed to be a dull, pale pink/orange. That is how clay looks under overcast daylight, and, to own the truth, that is how it looked on my phone even with True Tone turned on. Rendered with Rochés, my court was now on fire. And this being pastel not oil painting, there was no way I could cover it up in another layer, scrape down and start over. Not over an area this large.

I won't bore you any further with my travails getting the court texture right. (It looked like a Martian beach volleyball court after my first pass, and I spent a day editing it to look like it was flat even though churned up by footfalls.) Also, look closely at the racquet, and you'll see that the string bed is all wonky: this is what happened when I was trying to get just one more thing done after having already worked on the drawing something like seven hours that day, and decided to eyeball the string pattern instead of using a straight edge and measuring.

I got a lot wrong on this one.

A more disciplined artist would perhaps have thrown the work out and started the whole thing over--or gone for version 2.0 after having finished the first attempt. Certainly, Degas was known to do umpteen iterations of a given image until he found exactly the colors, contours, poses etc he was happy with. I do not have the discipline or the patience for this. I justify my laziness by thinking of the finished, flawed work as a record of my shortcomings as an artist--and as a record of growth, when looked back upon. Once I decide I'm done with something, I never go back to change it, even if there are some pretty bad-looking mistakes in there--because I don't want to think that I was better back then than I actually was.

So, yeah. May I present Novak tapping the clay off his shoe while looking a little sous-vided on a sea of lava, folks. Happy birthday, old man.

Face, hair

Shirt. (It's black, obviously, but an actual black pastel was used on less than a third of it.)

Legs

This went faster than a soft (dry) pastel piece would have--six days of work all told. One reason is that Sennelier makes only 120 colors in oil pastel, whereas a typical professional soft pastel range will have anywhere between 300-800 colors. Another thing is, in oil pastel, you have to be much more economical about layering, because after about three layers the pastels stop taking; a good sanded paper otoh will accept dozens of layers of dry pastel. So, less time spent color-matching, and less layering.

I go back and forth between loving the medium and being meh about it. I do love how quickly this worked up, how it forced me to forgo sharp edges and tight detail, and how working with far fewer colors still yielded rich chromatic results. I do not love how easily it smears and how easy it is to cross-contaminate colors because of the smearing.

The biggest drawback is that oil pastel never cures/dries. That means either framing the piece under glass, or packing it away under glassine paper. But framing is an arm and a leg, and putting it in a sandwich would probably do things to the impasto texture that are not ideal.

Side view showing impasto texture of work

There is fixative that you can spray on oil pastels to make it at least smudge- and dust-proof, but apparently, it doesn't work if you spray it on right away; you have to wait a few months for the work to set up a bit, then fix. (Those aren't the instructions on the bottle btw; the bottle says nothing about waiting a few months. But if people on the internet are right about having to wait at least three months first, that would explain why the fixative did nothing for this smaller piece I finished first and that I tried fixing right away.)

I've worked out a system for packing away pastel artwork. Anything smallish can go in a plastic envelope with a sheet of glassine paper over it, but for larger works, I make a sandwich out of mat board, which is thick cotton board that is used to mount artwork or photos for framing. The pastel goes in the middle of this sandwich, protected by a sheet of glassine paper.

Since this pastel was really large--45x40in (114x102cm)--making the board sandwich for it was A Thing. Mat board generally comes in sheets 40x32in large; larger sizes like 60x40in or even 72x48, 96x48, 104x60in exist, but Fedex/UPS won't deliver those; they have to come in a truck. That's hundreds of dollars in shipping costs, so instead of shelling out for 60x40s I ordered a bunch of 40x32s, cut a couple in half and taped the halves to the wholes to make larger sheets. I then layered two sheets on top of one another, taping them together around the edges, with the joins in individual sheets on opposite ends so the whole thing wouldn't fold where I'd taped a half sheet to a full sheet.

Multiply that by two, and I have my mat board sandwich. I take one last look at Novak and the ballkid, close the sandwich, then slide it into a massive plastic envelope made out of two 40x30in clear bags.

Every work I pack away like this gets its little label.

Not to be dramatic, but it feels like putting the artwork in a bodybag. I don't know when it'll ever come out of this plastic-wrapped sandwich. Getting it into this sandwich to begin with is such a pain in the ass that I can only foresee taking it out to frame it, for myself or if someone buys it. And when might that be? Who knows.

Daniil and the physio being packed away a couple of years ago. They haven't been out of their plastic-wrapped sandwich since, either.

This is one source of motivation to take on oil painting, which I made some forays into last year. Compared to pastels, oil paintings take much longer to complete and are way fussier; just preparing the painting surface is an absolute headache and can be a months-long process, if you're starting from stretching/mounting and priming the canvas yourself.

But a properly painted oil painting is indestructible. Indeed, you can't put a finished oil painting into a dark closet somewhere; the linseed oil binder used in the paints will turn yellow in the dark. Oil paintings have to stay out in good light; they demand to be in a place where they can be seen.

I have a couple from last year which I haven't shared, but are in my living/art studio area slowly curing before they get varnished (you have to wait 6-12 months after painting them to do that). They're not my best work--I haven't yet gotten the hang of oils the way I feel I've gotten the hang of pastels--but it's definitely nice being able to look at them whenever I want.