A step by step of a Fall Challenge or Oh Boy ...Pie

This weekend one of the guys on a forum I frequent suggest we do a Challenge paint and we agreed on Fall Harvest as the theme. Some of the folks on forum do periodic challenges where 5 or six people usually agree to the theme and time frame. When the paintings are finished we all pat each other on the back and say how grand the work is. The forum is populated with people different levels of accomplishment from the very accomplished to to very beginner. It's kind of fun and eases the pressure of production.

The forum is at http://www.drawmixpaint.com  where Mark Carder attempts to teach people who can't draw a lick to paint. It's a disciplined work flow or process that seems to work. It helped me get back in painting form after a six year layoff.

I thought I'd follow my process from sketch to finish sharing my thoughts and feelings as I go along.

Fall Harvest

 This is just an excuse for me to buy some Cortland apples and make a pie. I shouldn't be eating pie. These simple line sketches show my origin thinking on the project.  We have an old copper pale that I've wanted to use in a still like for a while. Thats where I started. As you see I like to use diagonals and squares and golden ratios in my thinking.

 

Original doodles from my sketchbook

 I use a Canon 5D Mark II connected to my MacBookPro with a USB cable. The Canon Camera Window app allows me to see the set up in a live view on the laptop. I have full control over the camera's features like exposure, fStop, and ISO. I can then shoot the images right from the computer.

This image is the first take with the camera. 

Original set-up. I like the relationship of the apples to the pail.

Original set-up. I like the relationship of the apples to the pail.

This set is okay. I almost decided to use this but kept pushing. I didn't like the left side. And it wouldn't fit real well in the 24 x 16 canvas I have on hand.  So I added another apple a cup and some pheasant tail feathers. 

setup...... It looks chaotic but it isn't. The lighting is simple. A 5000k pigtail florescent. Tracing paper is a good diffuser. The cardboard will look like wood when painted. 

Still life set-up. Light is a desk lamp with a tracing paper diffuser. It's all set on a workbench that serves a million functions in my limited space.

Still life set-up. Light is a desk lamp with a tracing paper diffuser. It's all set on a workbench that serves a million functions in my limited space.

The finished shot 

The finished shot 

I shoot photos as RAW format so that I can control exposure and the like in Photoshop. 

This image is a composite HDR. 2 exposures combined. I then process it with a few filters to add some squint  to it. It's now softened the colors are a little more real yet translated. The left side is now resolved. The feathers break up the straight line of the table.The apple in full shadow and tarnished silver goblet.  All the edges are apparent where to loose and where to define.  

 

Usually this is not my type of image but I like it. The reflections lost edges and light & dark. Below is a image overlaid with compositional guides.  24 x 16 inch proportion.

The finish with composition guides overlaid. I use these to transfer to canvas. 

The finish with composition guides overlaid. I use these to transfer to canvas. 

Sme of the key planning and interest points. The set-up was planned withe the 1 to 1.6 ratio in mind

Sme of the key planning and interest points. The set-up was planned withe the 1 to 1.6 ratio in mind

The next step is to make a full size image for color matching and drawing 1 to one. the prints I have now a half size so scaling using the proportional divider set to 1 to would be easy but full size will be easier on the eyes. The drawing will be simply blocked in with only details elaborated where necessary. The ground will be the same tinted gesso mixed a few months ago. There should be enough left.

The real next step is really making a pie from these lovely apples. Off to make the crust. 

Oh Boy Pie!

Well that it the pie is made all I have to do is eat it.. Later this week I start the painting hope.. Stay tuned for updated.

 

 

 

 

Update. Added Bell upper right. 

May use added bell?????

May use added bell?????

With the addition of the bell several good painters have brought the cup into question. I made a version without the cup. The jury is deliberating

With no cup

With no cup

6 value ranges

6 value ranges

After making this abstracted value range image in Photoshop I decided that the cup works best by breaking up the curve of the bottom of the pail. Just waiting on a set of new paints that I'll be testing on this painting. Can't wait.

Painting from photos in my studio

I paint in my studio. I do draw and sketch in the wild when I can. I travel far and wide to participate in life drawing sessions. But! I paint primarily in the studio from my photographs.I'm telling you this because I've had a few questions about it lately.  Today Plein Air painting is all the thing. I love it and have some favorite practitioners. But I work best in the studio on the board. I feel safe there. I can work in my underwear. I can have the Weather Channel on the TV or listen to an Stephanie Plum's latest misadventures. I can take a nap, which may be because I'm getting older which of course I'm not. But this is how I've always done it saince I was a teenager painting down in the cellar next to the furnace of my childhood home in Bradford, in my air-shaft studio at Kennedy Studios on Beacon Hill in Boston in the 70s and the Cupola in the old firehouse near South Station. Or my cramped 1 bedroom apartment in the Murray Hill neighborhood in Manhattan and all the other tiny spaces I've worked in.

I'm either working out of my head or working from photos that I have taken of things, places and people over the past many years. To build an image I cycle through these photos like a manic looking for the clues to where the voices are coming from. But for me it's not voices but stories and memories that call to me from my pictures. Stories that fade in and out and are forgotten and found and forgotten again. There is excitement and anticipation in every memory card filled only to be forgotten with every new iPhone camera click or when an ancient roll of prints from film or box of slides is rediscovered.

Mostly these photos were shot as sketches of the moment or place or light or time of day or object. They are like pencil marks on the pad for me.    All.    Every once in a while, while doing my manic shuffling, I find, I see the image I've lost and am looking for and  have been looking for for years. The process of building a painting begins.

I usually craft my photos into compositions that couldn't have been painted on the fly or in Plein Air while chasing light, rain, tide and the need to use the men's room.
Not by me at least. 

in the studio I can go through my anxious process of anticipation, preparation, loathing, hope and redemption over time. Not on location for surely it would kill me to suffer it all in an afternoon. I know this because every time I try - that's what happens. I'm slower than my surroundings.

I like being surrounded by my dried palette, little science experiments and disorder. Somehow it's the constant interchange with the disorder that I love.  It seems the only way I can create harmony on the canvas.

I'm a studio painter.

This image lures hanging in a window is an example of the 'manic shuffle' I had lost the set of images used to build this composition years ago. I had done several watercolors from this 2004 photo shoot in Rockport Harbor. I started building this composition in 2006. Abandoned it for 6 years while at the corporate sweat shop.   When I emerged early this year I couldn't find the images and sadly gave up on the picture that was in my head. In June I found them on an old hard drive. I spent a month tweeking the composition and painted it this in August. Most paintings don't happen like this for me. Only the good ones.

Motif Number 1.2

Oil on linen  26 x 20

©Jim Kingston  All Rights Reserved

Oy a pumpkin

I had to do it. I found this old pot up in the woods half buried and is rotted through. But has a great color and patina. It just so happens that a pumpkin is almost the perfect complementary color to it. So I bought a $2 pumpkin with a dent in it. I hadn't drawn of painted in a 2 weeks. I had a kidney stone blasted and then the rear door feel of my car. I feel good now but the door is still off the car.

So to keep my fingers and eyes limber I set these guys up and had a go. I painted them from life.  I wiggle around too much so keeping a steady point of view is a pain in the ass.  It's ok just ok. It'll never see a frame and you can only see it here. (iPhoto shot)

'ole Folkie Jim

This is my friend Jim Higgins. Known in folk music circles as 'ole Folkie Jim. We've known each other for years.  

I like this portrait because it grabs the essential Higgins. Intense and complex always with some humor underneath. I was a challenge painting this from an iPhone image with no mid tones. I did a little cosmetic surgery removing a few wrinkles. I think I captured the real him and his ever present Hawaiian shirt. 

It has to dry for a while with some thickish whites in the shirt. Then I have to oil it out to revive any sunken areas then away it goes. 

Jim Higgins

Oil on Linen 11 x 14

Back to life drawing at the AFA

Tonight I returned to life drawing on Tuesday nights at the AFA Gallery in Scranton facilitated by Ted Michalowski. This evening we had the best model I seen in 8 months. An anatomy lesson on 2 feet. 

There were 10 of 15 people there. What amazes me is that most of them are drawing in small (9 x 12) sketchbooks with little sharp pencils. They can draw but they even put two or three poses on a page. I paper so expensive? Drawing is a physical thing. You have to move and gesture. And they mostly sit at a table or in a chair. I stand for for 3 hours and I'm an old guy. Most of them are young kids.  It takes me an hour and a half driving each way. then 2 or 2 hours of poses. It's a days work but worth it. They have better pizza in Scranton. We have better cow pies.

Here are a couple of tonights poses.

 

I'm developing a technique using a sharpie to set the key points and gray pastels to give the form mass... stay tuned

This model was fantastic... really fantastic.

A 3 minute pose... I like this a lot