(In part one I’m going to talk about Reference in general.  In part two I’ll get specific on how to use it as a step in the process of creating a painting.)

It seems most artists are ashamed of it.  They keep it hidden away afraid the viewer will pull back the curtain and realize that the Wizard is just a homely little guy with a paintbrush.  Let me start by saying loudly and without restraint.

REFERENCE IS OUR FRIEND!

Let me tell you a little story about my beginnings with reference.  I didn’t begin to draw until I was 18 and was heavily influenced by a really good artist (and personal friend) at my local comic book shop who held the mindset that any type of reference was blatant cheating and a crutch for a lack of drawing skills.  That stuck with me for a long time and sadly delayed my progress as an artist for many, many, many, many, many years.  Yes, it was at least a five many stretch.  You don’t know what you don’t know.  Reference fills in what you don’t know.

Even the great and powerful Wizard had a few tools behind the curtain.

Use reference with abandonment.  I would strongly advise tracing too.

Whoa! Hold up!  Did I just say it was ok to trace.  Well, yes but there is a caveat.  You are allowed to do it if you learn something from doing it.  Trace to understand what you’re drawing and to memorize it.  Do it with a goal of being able to draw it if the reference disappeared.  I recently listened to an interview with Greg Manchess over at Sidebar.com (fantastic site by the way) and Greg said that while working at a design company in his youth he begrudgingly begin using an overhead projector in his work.  He said that he learned more on how to draw from that machine than any teacher he ever had.

You’re also allowed to trace if you already know how to draw and it helps you reach your goal.  I’m working on a 20″ x 30″ inch painting right now and I’ve used a lot of reference.  I have the ability to draw if freehand but it’s going to take much too long to get the drawing to the level that I want.  I’m using a grid transfer method to aid me in getting my drawing done faster and to keep the details that my mind would omit if I tried drawing it out of my head.

But, Bryan, why don’t you just trace it?  Because there are some pretty big pitfalls in doing that even when you do know how to draw.   From inherent distortion problems with photography to the fact that I’m not trying to just reproduce the photograph. I’m using the reference to hit a degree of realism  that my mind is not able to achieve on it’s on.  To supplement what I already know.  It’s a balance.  Reality is filled with so many subtle details that your mind can never remember them all.    And that’s a good thing.  It’s the mistakes or choices we make that go against reality that make our drawings so unique.  It’s what makes up the vision of an artist.

It’s a fine and sometimes confusing line, I know.  It’s very easy and common to see an artist just trace a picture with no skill to base it on.  To let the tracing substitute for his creation.  Reference has to be an aid to your creation not the creation itself.  It should be the means to an end not the end itself.   People and especially artists get so bent out of shape over this subject because they think reference is a substitute for skill.  That if f Joe Blow off the street with no drawing skill what-so-ever traces a picture and people are impressed that it’s like spitting in the face of an artist who has put in long hours of practice and dedication.  What they fell to realize is that no matter how well Joe copies it won’t equal or come close to what the trained artist can do.   It like comparing a memo from your boss on recycling to a great American novel. Here’s a great clip from the movie “Chasing Amy” that illustrates my point.

Reference is a tool.   It’s when it’s your only tool that it’s a problem.   So, go out today and trace a picture, than draw if out of your head.  While you’re at it draw from life too.  That’s better than anything.

This is the first in a series of posts concerning the mental process your brain should be taking in making a great painting.  Every piece will go through these stages and depending upon how well they are executed will result in the quality of the painting.  I’m going to skip over “Concept”, which is actually the first stage.  I’m assuming you know what you what to paint.  If now, then step one is as follows…decide what you’re going to paint.  After you’ve got your initial idea it time to figure out your most basic layout or your compositions.

Composition is simply the arrangement of shapes and values on your picture plane.

You want to aim for a combination of shapes, angles, lights and darks that is pleasing to the eye.  Well, what is pleasing to the eye you ask.  The eye likes what the brain likes and your brain likes to put things in some type of order.   It wants to take the chaos and arrange it into things that it understands.  It wants to group like shapes or sizes.  It wants to clean up a mess.  Don’t go overboard.

Aim for “Unity with Diversity”.

Most student will remember this phrase from art school.  The last thing I want you to do you to line up all your shapes from smallest to largest and call it a day.  That is the extreme that your brain is trying to do but if we travel all the way down this road will sacrifice all diversity and thus all the visual interest.  See, even though your brain is trying to put object in order it will get bored after it’s done and you don’t want boring painting.  The objective is to find that balance between unifying your composition but keep the diversity or visual interest.

One of the easiest ways to start this process is experiment or decide based on your subject matter what your dominant value will be.  Paintings should always have a dominant value.  It should be mostly dark, mostly light, or mostly a middle value.  This creates that unity by connecting large portions of your picture with one value.  Ohhh, your brain likey!  Here are some examples below.

Fig. 1 has a dominant dark value has has a number of shapes arranged or grouped in a pleasing fashion.  Fig. 2 on the other hand is weak and needs to make a decision.  In this instant as well as all you do in art, be CONFIDENT!  MAKE A DECISION!  Push your shapes and values to get a pleasing composition and then decide on your dominant value.  If you get this stage right you can make a slew of mistakes throughout the rest of the process and still end up with an impressive painting.  Nothing makes a great painting like a strong foundation and inversely nothing is worse than a weak one.

Finally finished.  I’m happy with the result but as always the picture in my head was 10 times better.  That’s progress as I can remember a time not so long ago with the pictures in my head were easily 1,000 times better when what my hands produced.

After the inks were dry I broke out my acrylics and threw down some washes of color.  I like a messy, let the color do it’s thing, kind of painting when water is involved.  You can get some great color intensities and effects.  After I laid in my initial washes I started to actually paint opaquely in spots careful not to over paint the inks.  They still had to show through.  In fact, I considered this finished when I approached the point where I could no longer keep going unless I started to paint over the blacks and if I did that this would quickly turn from a commissioned sketch to a full painting.  There wasn’t the time (or the budget) for that.

When I was finish a piece I alwasy let it sit a day or two because after some time away from a painting I alwasy see glaring things that I missed.  In this case it was some cool colors in the shadows.  I had such a warm intense yellow light hitting all that green that I really needed to cool my shadows.  Remember what Richard Schmid says in his wonderful book, “Everything I know about painting“.

If there is one rule about color it’s that “warm light produces cool shadows and cool light produces warm shadows.“

I didn’t want to paint over the blacks so I put strokes of blue and purple in lower light areas and areas of my halftone where the dark meets the light.  I think this really helps the color harmony and add a lot more visual interest to the piece.

The most important part is that the client loved it and has already commission a second piece.

Next on the project list was to ink Hela.  I use to use a brush a lot in my work but found over time that I really like a “dead” line and for that I’ve found inking with a brush to difficult.  I use Sakura Pigma Micron Pens for the line work and an old brush and black magic (or whatever is handy) ink to fill in the large parts.  The fact that I don’t do a ton of ink work probably reflects my lack of a favorite ink.

I don’t like to use a lot of halftone as I really like large areas of black and white.  Plus, I’m leaving something for the color to do beside just fill in white areas.

I won’t talk a ton about it as I’m working on an upcoming post about the subject of reference but I will mention that I do use it.  I combine photos from the Internet, magazines, and many that I produce myself as I’m also a novice  photographer.  This image is a combination of 3 or 4 photos that I put together in photoshop where I can digitally paint over top of them to create special effects or retool the lighting so that it all matches.  I’ve found through hard trial and error that the more time I take with preliminary things to prepare for a drawing or painting the better (and easier) they come out.

After I’ve got the photoshopped reference printed out I transfer it to my 14×17 bristol board.  I do this with a classic grid method.  Be careful if you use this method as if you don’t already know how to draw it can become a significant crutch.  I use it to make sure my proportions and angles are correct.  I bounce back and forth between drawing from reference to straight out of my head because while I want a correct looking drawing, I want it to be my drawing and not just a reproduction of the photos.  This can be a very fine line and the line is different for different artists.  (This topic sounds like a post in it’s own right)

Now that the ink work is done it’s on to the colors which I’ve already finished but I’ll give you a few days to absorb the ink before I post the color.

Color Intensity!

I used to watch a fantastic artist named Brian Stelfreeze every year at the Heroes comic convention doing a painting for the annual Heroes auction.  Many times I’d notice how he would create a hot spot of the most vibrant, intense color that would just leaped off of his painting.  How does he get that color to sing I’d ask myself?  Years later through study and painting daily myself it became apparent.

Let’s define a few things first.  The full intensity or color saturation is the purest the color can be.  It isn’t muted in any way by the addition or white or black.  Think of it as a color to it’s most extreme degree.

An artist can use it to draw the viewer eye to a certain area of the page or make that color literally look like it’s glowing.  Below I’ve sketched the face of a girl with red hair where in I’ve placed a yellow highlight.  I really wanted that highlight to look like it’s glowing.  When a pure bright color is placed or surrounded by a greyed color or colors it increases the intensity of the pure color.  You’re looking for a high contrast of value or intensity.  You can see how the highlight on the hair of the girl on the left really shines but the one on the right is too similar in value and does not have enough contrast to make the highlight stand out.  So watch out for using values or saturation/intensities that are too similar.

For an even greater effect use complementary colors because, as we know, these colors opposite each other on the color wheel have a natural ability to affect each other in ways that intensify the other.

There are numerous artist who are masters of this technique.  The best I’ve ever seen is the painter Joseph Turner.   A more contemporary example would of course be Brian Stelfreeze.

Thanks for reading and make sure to try this in your next painting.  The best way to learn is to do.

I’ve always wanted to be an art teacher.  Then I looked into the salaries that most teachers make and it wasn’t a pretty picture.  The past few weeks I’ve been working on projects that I can’t post yet and might not be able to for a little while and I thought what can I do to keep my blog rolling that won’t stray to far.  In comes “Getting your learn on”, hopefully a weekly post showcasing a particular art technique, concept, idea  or even a review of an art related material like paint brushes or sticks.  Yes, you can paint with sticks.

Stay tuned.  I’ll post the first one tomorrow.