It’s been a while since I’ve posted any art for all of my faithful readers out there (mom and dad?). Here’s a digital speed painting of an underwater scene (I made this in February). “Painted” in Adobe Photoshop CS5.5.
Author: John Van Houten
I’m still alive!
It’s been quite a while since I last updated my website! One of the reasons for this is that I’m still a little undecided as to whether I’m going to keep my current website, or move to a different one. I have to jump through many hoops (not literally) to get my artwork on my website and have it look acceptable. The color profiles on the images disappear and I have to make odd adjustments to the artwork so they look okay on certain computers (on other computers such as mine they look very different). It’s a big hassle. I’m figuring some things out and hopefully I won’t have to worry about loss of color and quality anymore.
In other news, I am going to have access to a scanner again (I really should buy one soon) and I will be scanning some art soon. Also, I’ve been studying perspective and reading a lot of graphic novels lately (And I’m brainstorming some ideas for an original graphic novel of my own). Stay tuned for more art/updates!
Mini Winter Painting
Here’s a tiny 2.5″ x 4″ acrylic/oil painting on illustration board. A lot of the painting was done utilizing negative space. I first painted the board with acrylic paint and then I painted around the shapes with oil paint. You can see a digital study I did in preparation for it here. I’ll post some progress shots later.
Still Life Painting Atelier Review
This post is my review of Still Life Painting Atelier: An Introduction to Oil Painting by Michael Friel.
In my last post, I reviewed Jane Jone’s book Classic Still Life Painting. Today I’m reviewing Michael Friel’s book Still Life Painting Atelier. His book covers topics such as studio safety, lighting your still life, stretching paper, and several painting demonstrations that show how he uses limited color palettes, scumbling, glazing, and more.
Michael’s book has over 20 pages of information about painting materials (brushes, paints, oils, varnishes, supports, etc.). He discusses how someone can arrange objects and set up a still life. Michael talks about how he paints reflections and translucent surfaces (something very intimidating to beginners). He demonstrates an alla prima (wet into wet) still life painting, in addition to a still life painting executed by painting a grisaille (a monochromatic underpainting) followed by transparent glazes of color.
A lot of the information in this book is rudimentary, but for a beginner, the information is necessary. For someone that’s new to oil painting, the breadth of information covered in this book is enough to inspire and set the wheels in motion for their artistic development. Compared to Classic Still Life Painting by Jane Jones (see that review here), I think Still Life Painting Atelier is a better book for the beginning oil painters.
If you’re an artist that likes to paint with watercolor and now you’re looking to try oil painting, I think you might may want to first read Jane Jone’s book Classic Still Life Painting, and then read Still Life Painting Atelier once you decide you want to try some different approaches to painting. Although I think Still Life Painting Atelier is a better book for the beginning oil painters, Classic Still Life Painting focuses on the technique of glazing oil paint (the oil paint equivalent of watercolor washes), which should be more familiar to the watercolorist. By all means, read Still Life Painting Atelier and Classic Still Life Painting.
Little Marker Monsters
Little marker monsters. That’s what happens when I am left alone with markers, pens, and some paper. I had some scraps of printmaking paper left over from my printmaking class and I was curious how markers would handle on the printmaking paper and what they would look like. I believe the paper is Rives BFK. I used Prismacolor Premier markers and Faber-Castell Pitt artist pens (mostly the brush pen).
Most of these little marker monsters were amorphous marker blobs on the paper and after the marker splotches dried I used the Pitt pens to create creatures. I didn’t know what I was going to draw but I let the shapes feed my imagination and I let my pen discover the creatures hidden in the blobs of color. At that point, if I wasn’t completely satisfied I would add some additional shapes or coloring (like a shadow) with the Prismacolor markers.
The Rives BFK paper really soaked up the ink from the markers and bled a bit (marker bleed is when the ink from the marker is soaked up into the paper like a sponge and it spreads out). I couldn’t do much coloring on top of the Pitt pen ink because the alcohol in the markers caused the ink from the pens to smudge and bleed a little bit too.
Each one of these tiny little marker monsters is about 1-1.5″ x 1-1.5″. They are TINY. That’s part of the fun for me. The words and odd colors in each image are part of my experiments and notes when I was testing out the markers on this paper. The notes and other marker tests aren’t really relevant to the little marker monsters so I cropped that stuff out (and some of the little monsters were upside down and this way you can more easily view them). I definitely plan on doing more of these little marker monsters. And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for!
First up is Angry Big Head (yay for creativity in choosing names!):
Next, we have the Cocoon Monster:
The Cowering Baboon Creature:
One-Eyed Dog Creature:
Parasite Gradient Gryphon (my favorite):
Television Head:
Two-Armed Sideways Mouth Monster (an example of my terrible naming ability):
Long Gray Face:
What do you think?
Classic Still Life Painting Review
This post is my review of Classic Still Life Painting: A Contemporary Master Shows How to Achieve Old Master Effects Using Today’s Art Materials by Jane Jones.
I recently read two different still life painting books because I have been in the mood to paint some still life paintings. I did some research online and ended up reading Classic Still Life Painting, and Still Life Painting Atelier. Watson-Guptill publishes both books (it seems like almost every book I read is published by Watson-Guptill).
Classic Still Life Painting is focused on painting still lifes with transparent glazes of oil paint. Painting with transparent glazes (a la watercolor) creates luminosity not possible through strictly opaque application of paint because of the way light bounces through the paint (perhaps I’ll do a blog post about that). She covers five pages of materials for painting and then jumps right into some color theory and color palettes, also differentiating paints that are transparent and those that are opaque. Jane has some helpful tips on creating your own color charts (color charts/color notes are helpful formulas of color mixtures that the artist references to accurately re-mix paint if needed). Throughout the book, Jane shows her color notes/charts and it might seem overwhelming for the beginning oil painter. Don’t worry so much about the color mixtures that she mixes from her smorgasbord of oil paints, and instead focus on the technique she is using to paint.
She talks about preparing a support (the surface that receives the paint), blending, using an alkyd such as Liquin, and lighting a still life. Jane primarily photographs her still life setups and paints from many different photos of the scene. She discusses some tips for photographing a still life.
Jane talks about accurately drawing and perspective in the next chapter, as well as the steps she takes to draw her demo still life. She then paints an underpainting and begins glazing many layers of paint. She shows another painting using the same methods but with slightly different elements. This continues for the rest of the book until the end where she talks about varnishing.
Something that bothered me about the book Classic Still Life Painting, is that Jane naggingly reminds the reader that they should use alkyd medium in each subsequent layer on the painting. Sure, she could mention that once, but the reader might miss it and it’s kind of important. I suppose a couple reminders are okay, but she makes a point to slip that “helpful hint” into the text so many times that it started to drive me nuts. I get it! I should use Liquin in every layer! OKAY! Additionally, after the first couple demos, the book seems a bit repetitive and I lost my interest (but that doesn’t mean you will lose interest!).
Overall, I think Classic Still Life Painting is a nice book and it can certainly be of value to beginning oil painters, watercolorists transitioning to oil painting, and artists who want to try a classical technique to paint still lifes.
Stay tuned for my next still life book review blog post where I review Still Life Painting Atelier by Michael Friel.
Another Winter Speed Painting!
Here’s yet another winter speed painting! Digitally painted in Adobe Photoshop CS5. I had the idea for this speed painting after wearing some of those sepia tinted glasses the eye doctor gives you after they dilate your eyes, and looking at the woods behind my house (in the winter). The basic concept is an overall brown tint but with cool blue snow. I think I’ll eventually do an oil painting of this scene and concept.
Winter Speed Painting Animated
Here’s an animated GIF of a winter speed painting I did a while ago, and several different variations of the same image. I digitally painted this as a color study for a miniature oil painting. When I get a chance to scan the oil painting, I’ll post it online. If you don’t see this image changing, give it a moment, your internet may be slow (or something went terribly wrong on my end).
Dad – Oil on Hardboard. 18″ x 14″
Here’s an oil painting of my assassin dad (note to FBI, he’s not actually an assassin). This painting took much longer than it should have. I finished it earlier this year (it was an assignment from one of my first oil painting classes a year or so ago). I basically used this painting over the course of a year or so to teach myself how to paint. By the time I was almost done with this painting I was taking an alla prima painting class and it was extremely hard to continue painting in this hyper-polished painting style (this was the kind of painting style I had to resist to complete this painting). A little bit of the alla prima painterly brushstrokes are visible in his facial hair. This painting went through a lot of major transformations during its creation. I don’t think I took many photos of this painting in progress but I’ll see what I can dig up. It was really hard to get my father to make a serious face for the reference photos. The painting looks a lot better in person because it doesn’t have those annoying glares that the scanner picks up.
On a related note this is one of the first paintings I did on my own hand primed surface. I used hardboard (it’s not called Masonite you buffoons!) that I purchased from Lowe’s. I believe it’s 3/16″ hardboard. My father and I cut the hardboard on his table saw. I sanded and gessoed (not using traditional gesso, but rather an acrylic emulsion) the hardboard myself. I applied the “gesso” with a foam brush. That was a terrible mistake (or maybe the gesso I was using was bad). Somehow little bits of hard gesso would catch on the foam brush and drag into the gesso application, leaving random vertical and horizontal indents. If I redid this painting I’d make sure to get an even surface on the board before painting (and I’d re-cut the board using a band saw).
Elmer’s Carpenter’s Wood Glue Max Strength Test
Because I need strong wood glue to keep a painting attached to the wood braces.
Lately I have been doing a lot of prep work for future paintings. I also am looking into wood bracing (often referred to as cradling) for two finished paintings (which, now that I think about it, aren’t even on my website yet). After searching through dozens of threads on WetCanvas and AMIEN, I still wasn’t exactly sure what type of glue to use to attach the bracing to the back of the paintings but I knew that I wanted the bracing to be strong. After reading about some strength tests with several types of glues, I made a not-so-quick trip to Lowe’s and I purchased Elmer’s Carpenter’s Wood Glue Max (they also offer a non “max” wood glue). For the test I used 3/16″ hardboard (often mistakenly referred to as Masonite) and 1″ x 2″ select pine wood for the bracing. I used the Wood Glue Max to glue the select pine to the hardboard. The glue was allowed to dry for 24 hours (although this test was actually done several days after gluing).
Here’s a video of my testing the strength of the glue:
As you can see, the glue held a strong bond and the wood broke instead of the glue. I will definitely be using this wood glue in the future, and no, I’m not being paid by Elmer’s to praise their product.