The making of...

Being unsure about what to do next, how to go about it, or putting a lot of effort in only to get a poor or middling result can be a dismal, off putting, and paralyzing experience.  Enough of these experiences in a row, or having more of these than the successes, is just about enough to make a person pack it in entirely.

Understanding an approach that works for you and lifts the chances of success is key to not only to developing your art but is also required to form the habits and attitudes needed for a continuous practice.  

I thought it might be interesting to make a post on my current process for making an painting, and I'll use Showgrounds as the example.  I think in the future when my process changes I'll update with a new post outlining what the updated process is and why it has changed.

I want to say that I don't carry around the idea there's only one way to go about painting and drawing.  Given the array of interesting art and art practices it would be an untenable position to hold.  Most artists work within a set of constraints suited their circumstances.  For me and for the present, my constraints mean the process has to be economical in time and has to increase the chance of a successful painting because I can't afford to waste hours fruitlessly.

In short my process is compromised of the following steps:

• Gather reference material.
• Identify reference material with potential.
• Photo editing and thumbnail sketches.
• Value sketches.
• Final Painting.

Gather reference material

I currently working from photographs because it saves time.  Even when I'm doing a still life I often use a camera as a view finder and keep the digital image on hand while I'm painting.  I'm not a photographer and to make up for some of the shortfall in skill I take oodles of photographs.  I generally go for a walk, run, or drive with my phone and what I'm looking for is a scene with some interesting lights and darks.  The Mt Gravatt showgrounds are a short walk from home and the unremarkable photo below is one of around fifty I took at the showgrounds.

Identify reference material with potential

The fifty digital images sat amongst many others on Google Photos for almost a year.  What I do from time to time is review, sort and cull this catalogue of images.  I'm asking myself a couple of questions: Do I think this is useful? Am I interested enough to go through with a painting? Most images just get deleted, but some pique interest and I catalogue them as reference material with potential.

At the time I reviewed the above photograph, I believed I was holding onto it because I really wanted to do a painting of the showgrounds more than the photograph itself having potential for a painting.  However, I resolved to hang onto it.

Photo editing and thumbnail sketches

It was about a year before I came back to the photograph. What I try to do next is find a composition in the image which results in an interesting arrangement of light and dark shapes.  This is also referred to as Notan and there's a good post on this by Will Kemp here. 

I generally play with cropping the image directly in a photo editing app and by making small thumbnail sketches in black and white.  The process of drawing is necessary to gain an understanding of the image.  A photo editing app speeds up the process of finding an interesting composition and the conversion to black and white but it doesn't deliver the same understanding.  I aim to do at least two thumbnails to explore variations and if I find I'm at thumbnail number five and I'm still not feeling it, then it probably doesn't have the potential I thought it did.  Or maybe I'm just completely missing the potential it has.  Either way, at some point you have to cut your losses and move on.  If a potential image doesn't emerge within 15-20 minutes, the photograph gets deleted or filed again and I move on.

        

Above are two of the three thumbnails I did and these were drawn in a photo editing app.  The third which I’ve misplaced was done with graphite pencil on post-it note paper.  Of the above thumbnails the one on the left was the more obvious landscape composition and uses a 4:3 ratio.  In doing this one I realised it was the smaller building that I liked more.  So I tried a couple of thumbnails with a closer cropping.  The one I lost (or threw out) had the whole sunlit face of the building within the frame and was about an 10:8 ratio.  The second thumbnail above is the one I found to be more interesting and it is square (1:1 ratio).

That's how I arrived at the cropping of the final reference photograph below.

Value Sketch

"Value does all the work and colour gets all the credit".  The purpose of the value sketch is to simplify the range of values, organise their relationships (What needs to be darker?  What needs to be lighter?) so it still reads correctly, and a chance explore how much detail can be stripped out without losing the subject to abstraction.  It provides a solid head start to tackling the painting. 

In the above value sketch I've limited myself to about four grays to map out the image and I then went back into the larger gray-shapes and made some variations.  The value sketch is about 10 x 10 cm and I think I spent somewhere around 30 minutes of drawing.  Some of this time is spent getting away from the drawing and coming back so I can see it with fresh eyes.

Then ask myself questions like: Am I still interested?  Do I feel this will work?  Is there anything I think I don't have a handle on?  Is it still worthwhile making it a painting?  

With this one I felt it was still a worthwhile.  However, if I didn't, I still hadn't invested so much time and energy that it would be an awful loss to just give the idea away.

Final Painting

The next stage is the final painting.  There's still much to work out but having an intended composition, and a cropped reference photo, a thumbnail (Notan), and a value sketch to support it, I can start painting with the knowledge it has a good chance of coming out ok.

I'm also freed up to concentrate on colour mixing, brush work, hue, saturation, gradations, shifts in colour temperature, texture, levels of detail, and stepping back to take in the image as a whole, and other aspects of the painting process.  Especially important is when to stop.  

With this painting some specific concerns were shifting colour temperature in the transitions from sunlit to shade, how much to lighten the shadows (photographs make shadows darker than we experience them), exaggerating the reflected light on the boards within the shadows to create interest in the shaded area, how to tackle the topography of the ground with brushstrokes and colour temperature shifts.  And finding out how important the small touches that indicate the reflections of sky in the windows are to the success of the overall image.  It's something I hadn't understood when making the thumbnails (even though I included them), or in cropping the photograph or doing the value sketch.

If I was struggling with the composition or values, didn't have such a clear intention in mind, I might not have been as free to just paint, find the picture I have, and enjoy the process.

Conclusion

With the process I have I find I’m never at a loss for ideas and there’s no excuses, I know what I have to do and how to go about it. I can carry out a work in one hit when there’s time or break it into smaller steps and fit it around a busy life. It gets me to painting quickly and with more confidence of getting a result. While there’s always times I don’t feel up to it or have moments of uncertainty, these seem less frequent and they’re not as difficult to overcome and just start making.

If there was anything I'd like to do differently, it would be to incorporate small colour studies into the process to allow the opportunity to experiment with a broader range of approaches to colour.  And at some point I will do this, however for the above is more than enough to master.