I had to stop this painting early.
I was getting very frustrated with the wood block, so much so that I knew I needed to step back and asses the damage then continue at another time.
Overview
The painting was going fine until I hit that darn wood block. The internal shapes and transitions of color and value and drawing was just too much of a jumble of junk for me to translate into paint. I had such a hard time just seeing the simplification of the wood. This is very important, I love to do landscapes and if I can’t simplify a piece of wood that could be a very big issue considering that most landscapes have trees… and wood.
So in order to learn more and analyze what I must do. I took the still life into Photoshop and used the cutout filter on it so I could see a simple version of the wood block. To see how I can possibly simplify my strokes to mimic the wood accurately. This is pretty great actually, I can’t wait to begin again tomorrow and tackle this issue with the knowledge below in hand.
Hopefully by tomorrow the paint will be dry and I can, begin again. It should be even better tomorrow because I nice coat of paint on these horrible panels will do me a lot of good. I can’t wait till I use all these darn things up so I can paint on canvas again.
My hierarchy of painting importance
- Drawing
- Value
- Edges
- Composition
- Color
Drawing
How can I improve the drawing
My main measurement here is the tip of the nose of the back dolphin to its dorsal fin. As you can see that part of the drawing is pretty close. The further from there the worst it gets. At one point I actually moved the dorsal fin of the front dolphin more to the left because I was thinking it was too far right, boy was I wrong… I didn’t expect the drawing to be very close either. I wasn’t focusing on it tremendously well.
Value
How can I improve the values?
Edges
Not much focus on edges.
Composition
I kept the composition simple and didn’t focus on it at all. The only thing I wanted to do was keep the entire figure in the painting.
Color
Not much of a focus on color here. I just recognized which areas were warm and which were cool and tried to keep them somewhat true.