Hello Everybody,
Simon, Nigel, and Nap - thanks for the humorous and kind words! Yes, I have no doubt had I grown up in the 60s, this would've been a much easier pattern to paint
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I would've liked to have posted sooner, but I got I got caught up in another project while waiting for paint to dry on this one. Anyway...
In today's post, we're going to expand on (quite a bit) and finish off the pattern we started on in the last post. Let's start with the paints used:
From left to right we have:
- Warm Light Yellow (Michael Harding)
- Primary Blue (Blockx)
- Veronese Green (Williamsburg Oils)
- Cadmium Yellow Medium (Williamsburg Oils)
- Sevres Blue (Williamsburg Oils)
- Cadmium Vermillion (Williamsburg Oils)
- Cadmium Orange (Williamsburg Oils)
All of the above paints were used to paint the pattern and its constituent elements. With the exception of the Primary Blue from Blockx, all had a little bit of Titanium White (Old Holland) mixed into them to make them a little bit more opaque. Most of these paints are pretty opaque to begin with (especially the Cadmiums), but by mixing in a little bit of the white, we make the opacity a little stronger. Of course, you have to be careful, because you can (obviously) lighten your colors, which isn't what we're going for, so when doing this, just add a very small amount. For this bit of painting, we want our paints to be extra opaque because we're going to be painting a lot of layers on top of each other, and we don't want anything to show through.
Alright, let's get started. For reference, we last left off here:
This is where we want to eventually get to:
Obviously, quite a bit happened in-between those two photos; lets see how we can break things down to get to the end in one piece
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As I've mentioned several times before, the best way to approach complex patterns is to try to break them down into simpler, separate elements. Let's do that here (
In my case the photo I used was taken from the book, Figure Painting Techniques F.A.Q by Kirill Kanaev). I think by doing this, it'll give a little more context to what or why I made certain decisions regarding order of operations, etc... It'll also be a nice change from how I usually write up freehand stuff
Looking at the finished pattern, I thought it would be easier to tackle the inside of the paisley first. There is no right or wrong here to determine where to start something like this. We can immediately see that inside each paisley - going from outside in - we have several borders of different colors. These borders are actually a little simpler to paint than you might think. There is a little trick... Instead of trying to paint them as borders or stripes, paint the entire space that color, and after its dry, go in with the next color, and paint everything inside, but just leave a little bit of edge showing of the prior color.
We'll start with the outer most border, which we'll paint using the Primary Blue, mixed with a little Mars Black (Vasari Oils - this was not pictured) to paint the entire inside of the paisley:
Before I went ahead and filled this in, I made sure that the borders painted in the last post where
completely dry. This is for the very obvious reason that I will definitely accidently paint "outside" the lines, and I'll have to go in with white spirit and clean things up. And the last thing I want to do is erase the borders by accident!! Aside from that, there is nothing too hard here - its literally just filling in the shapes.
Looking at our reference above, we can see that inside the blue border is a yellow, so once the blue has dried, we'll fill in most of that with the Cadmium Yellow (remember, we mixed a little bit of Titanium White to get it more opaque). Here is this step:
Again, this was pretty simple, and we now have a nice, even blue border. Since the blue was dry, if we mess up or parts of the border/edge aren't even, we can go in with a little white spirit and make things better. One thing I think worth pointing out is that by using an opaque color (Cadmium Yellow) and then mixing in a little bit of the white, I got complete coverage with just one coat/layer. We'll let this layer dry now. Also shown in the photo above is the fact that while waiting for this to dry, I went ahead and base coated, shadowed, and highlighted the outside of the cloak - but that will be discussed in a future post...
Next we see that the final color of the paisley is orange. So just like we did with the yellow, we'll take our Cadmium Orange, mix a little bit of Titanium White into it, and cover the center of the shape and leave just enough of the yellow showing to create a nice border (Using white spirit to fix anything if needed):
Now we have a nice yellow inner border for our shape. We've now completed laying down the main colors inside our shape, and we can move onto the
ornamentation. We'll be doing 3 different ornamentations in our element - the inside of each border will be dotted, and inside the center, we're going to get a V or U like flower petal shape.
As before, let's work from the outside in. This means, we'll go ahead and put the dots in our blue border:
The dots were made with pure Warm Light Yellow. The only care here is to make sure they're spaced as evenly as you can make them. Let's wait for them to dry, and put in the dots for the yellow, inside border:
These dots were made with the Veronese Green - it's basically a little bit brighter, more opaque version of "Emerald" green. It's a very pretty color. Again, we'll let these dry.
While waiting for both the orange and the dots to dry, I decided to go ahead and paint the "petals" of our paisley. This was by far the most difficult part of the pattern, and took almost the entire day. They were painted using the Warm Light Yellow. To make this easier, I decided to break this down into its own separate parts. The first part are the lines painted around the outside of each paisley, and the second part are the tops connecting all the lines. Here is the first part:
If you look at the bottom right of the photo above, you can see all the lines painted in. Once all the lines are in, I just connected them together by painting the letter 'C' across the tops of all the lines:
That's the finished petals, let's go ahead and do all of the rest of them:
I can't tell you how happy I was after finishing this step
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By now, our dots and orange centers have dried, so lets go ahead and paint the last of the ornaments inside the center of each paisley:
We'll just paint in some 'U' or 'V' shaped elements to make things look a little busier and balanced out. These were painted using Sevres Blue and (here we go again) a little bit of Titanium White mixed into it.
With the centers finished, we've now completed the paisley elements, and we can now focus on the area outside the shapes. To complement the paisley, we'll go with a floral/dots pattern. Before we start filling everything in with dots, lets take a look at where there is a lot of empty space between each paisley, and put some small flowers there. Each flower was painted with a center painted using our Sevres Blue mix, and the petals were painted using Cadmium Red Vermillion. Here is the first flower:
If you look at the bottom of the photo above, on the right side, you can see the completed flower, and you can also see the blue centers I painted in. I put the centers in first, so I could gauge the balance and space between each of the flowers. Here are all the flowers completed:
All of the flowers were painted by using a dotting motion instead of a typical stroking motion.
Now that the flowers are in, we can go ahead and finish the pattern. In all the space left over, we're going to paint trails of dots using the Cadmium Orange:
And we're finished! Here's another pic of the finished pattern:
And this entire time, there was the other side as well
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In our next post, we'll tackle the outside of the cloak, which will be another freehand, but I'm not sure what it'll be just yet.
Thanks for reading!
Regards,
-Phil
. The prior practicing definitely helped with the basic shape, but... As I've mentioned before in other posts where I'm discussing freehand designs, my hands shake, I'm not too particularly gifted artistically, and my eyes are terrible. However, (as I've also mentioned before) the ability to paint nice freehand patterns doesn't depend on any of that... They depend essentially on patience and being incredibly stubborn! I think it's important to include mistakes, messiness, etc. Because I don't know anybody that just nails it on one take (well, maybe Alexandre Cortina), and I'd like to show the kinds of trials and travails that we all have to go through...
...pure style Nigel
