Baking for Santa

In a past post I showed you my Milk and Cookies painting. I told you to stay tuned for the process shots of the painting and I like to keep my word, so feast your orbs on these Milk and Cookies process photos!

If you follow me on Twitter then you have probably seen this preliminary sketch of my idea for the Milk and Cookies painting:

 

I toned this board a couple of months ago in preparation for a still life painting that I never got around to painting, so I decided to use it for the Milk and Cookies painting. Here we have the hardboard coated with washes of acrylic paint to establish a base color for the painting (also known as imprimatura).

 

Next, I drew directly on the board with pencils (probably 2H and HB pencils).

 

Then I began oil painting, beginning with some thinly applied darker colors to establish some local color.

 

More oil paint is added to the painting! Wow! This photo was taken when the painting was about halfway done. When you reach this point while painting you often need to check yourself and remain calm. The painting doesn’t look so hot. You know better than that! It’s going to be wonderful! You have to remind yourself that all is well and that the painting will come together after you add some highlights.

 

Said highlights are added. Doesn’t that look much better? I told you that it would come together.

Then I forgot to take any more photos because that’s what happens when you lose yourself in a painting and really start to have fun. Plus, it’s a pain to have to constantly remove my painting gloves (surgical gloves–so you could say that I do surgery on boards with paint), hunt down the terrible point-and-shoot camera and try hard to get a photo that’s not completely blurred.

I wasn’t sure how I was going to show the glow of the cookies and milk but I decided on a unnatural blue color and I had a blast with the mark making.

Here’s an animated GIF:

 

Post Processing

It’s not very often that you’re shown the post-process part of the process, so let’s change that. After the painting is dry (I add Liquin to my paint so I only had to wait about 2 days for it to be completely dry–it would have been dry sooner but a few thick brushstrokes of titanium white paint were still damp after day 1 [because the paint was thicker, and because white paint dries slowly]) I bring it to school where I scan it on one of their fancy scanners (The scanners are used by the whole school so they happen to have scratched glass, which means I have to pick out little dust spots and scratches after I scan my artwork).

Once I scan my painting, I edit the scanned painting in Adobe Photoshop and start adjusting the colors and levels to match my original painting. There’s a lot of tinkering with the scanned painting until it finally resembles the original (And then you have things to worry about like the color calibration on your monitor, the level of brightness of your monitor when color correcting scanned artwork, the type of lighting affecting the painting as you compare it to your screen, etc.). It still never beats how the original actually looks in person.

 

Here’s what the painting looks like when scanned, but before the digital magic that makes it look like the actual painting (Which probably still doesn’t look close to the original painting because of how our monitors are calibrated).

 

Here’s an image of my layers palette, showing you all of the adjustments I had to make to the scanned painting. This doesn’t show the dust and scratches I removed either.

Here’s an animated look at the before and after of the digital post processing:

Some day I’ll probably do an entire blog post about post processing for artwork.

 At The Gallery

Finally, here I am at the Fountain Street Church Keeler Gallery Non-Christmas Christmas Show. The show runs through January 2, 2014, so get there while you still can!

I had the painting framed by MercuryHead Gallery. I’m always satisfied with the service they provide and I enjoy talking art with the folks over there.

You can purchase the Milk and Cookies painting! Talk to the people in charge at the Keeler Gallery in Fountain Street Church, or contact me. If you’d rather buy prints, or pillows, or what have you, then you can stop by my Society6 store and do just that!

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to drop my a line in the comments.

Santa loves milk and cookies. I painted him anticipating some milk and cookies. Here’s a sneak peek of a painting that I have in the Fountain Street Church Keeler Gallery Non-Christmas Christmas Show. The theme of the show is Anticipation. The show runs November 27, 2013 through January 2, 2014. This photo was taken during the process of the painting, so some things have changed. I’m pretty sure that I took several process photos, so stay tuned for more art!

It’s been a while since I’ve shown some process shots of my art so let’s take a look at an older gouache painting. The painting assignment restricted my palette to just black and white.

Here’s the painting:

Now you may be asking yourself “who or what is Surtur?” or “what the heck is Amon Amarth?”

Surtur (also known as Surtr) is a jötunn (aka a giant) from Norse mythology (aka Scandinavian mythology). He also has a fiery sword. That’s pretty much all you need to know. Amon Amarth is a band that doesn’t like to be labelled “viking metal”. They sing (or growl or whatever you want to call it) about vikings. They have viking themed albums. They love norse mythology. Whatever. They are a melodic death metal band. One of their albums is Surtur Rising.

Now onto the process:

Instead of doing a grisly and dark illustration that is typically associated with bands like Amon Amarth, I decided to do a “comicy” style illustration. Side note: this painting is probably the first gouache painting I did since I took the color theory class years ago.

To begin, here are the 50 thumbnails I did prior to deciding on a composition (each thumbnail is about 1.375″ x 1.875″). Because the illustration was going to be a poster I had to also think about text placement when designing my composition.

 Sometimes I’m kind of undecided about things, maybe (see what I did there?). I chose some thumbnails that I especially liked from the 50 above and drew some larger refined thumbnail drawings. Each thumbnail is 2.25″ x 3″. I drew them on gray paper because I had some gray paper left over from when I operated an offset printer in high school and I figured “why not?” (don’t answer that).

I decided on the design and composition and drew up a larger drawing for the “pencils” stage. Not pictured are the reference photos I took for this illustration. The final pencil drawing is 7.5″ x 10″ (by the way, pretty much all of my art is for sale. If you want some original art, all you need to do is contact me). The pencil drawing is drawn on some horrible shiny paper. I don’t even know why this paper was manufactured. It’s very difficult to make revisions to the drawing because of the slick surface of the paper (also included are creases that I accidentally added to the paper).

To figure out how the ships would look I downloaded a Google SketchUp model and used that as reference. When I made this painting I hated SketchUp. That’s mainly because I was only using the trackpad on my laptop instead of a mouse. Tip for anyone using SketchUp: use a mouse (the computer peripheral not the rodent).

Next up I painted a value study for the painting. I find these to be more fun than the actual painting and often times I like them more than the final painting. They have a lot of energy and painterly marks. I scanned the drawing and printed it out on my B&W laser printer. I glued it to cardboard (probably the back of an oatmeal box because I recycle [you should recycle too]). This value study is 6″ x 8″.

I only remembered to take a couple of photos of the illustration in progress.

 The pencil drawing is transferred to the illustration board.

The painting is almost finished.

And the painting before text was added.

And that’s it for this episode of my creative process. What do you think? Feel free to leave a comment. Speaking of comments: It has come to my attention that some of the older less-computer-literate readers don’t know how to leave comments. If you are reading my blog on my homepage then you just simply click the gray word bubble next to the title of the blog post (see image below).

If you have clicked on the blog post title, or you are only seeing one blog post with no other posts on the page then you can probably just scroll down the page and you should see a comment box. Congratulations! You now know how to comment! If you want more John VanHouten in your life between blog posts you can follow me on Twitter.

Here’s a sneak peak of me sketching a creepy dentist for an upcoming digital painting. Look at all of those tools in his evil teeth-cleaning hand (do you recognize any of those tools?). I posted this on Twitter (I encourage you to follow me on Twitter if you like art, or just crazy shenanigans–but mostly art) first but in case you missed it, here it is:

 

And yes, that’s how I hold my pencil. I never said I was normal.