About Karin

Karin Wells is an artist of amazing versatility. She graduated with honors from both the New England School of Art and Design, Boston, 1965, and the Butera School of Art, Boston, 1986. Karin has enjoyed a career as an award-winning graphic designer, illustrator and sign painter. She also taught Life Drawing and Painting for many years. She has most recently studied for three years at The New England School of Classical Painting in Greenfield, New Hampshire, under the direction of Numael Pulido.

To expand her craft, Karin has traveled throughout Europe studying the Old Masters. Her art reflects the deep influence of these great works. Karin demonstrates a remarkable facility for likeness and for the use of light.

The artist is a member of The American Society of Portrait Artists, Portrait Society of America, The Portrait Society of Atlanta, and The Copley Society of Boston.

To learn more about Karin and to view more of her amazing work, be sure to visit her website and blog by following the links below:

Website: http://www.karinwells.com/

Blog: http://karinwells.blogspot.com/

If you would like to be notified when Karin updates her blog, be sure to click the “Follow” link in the upper left hand corner of her blog.

Counterintuitive Painting – or – The Problem Might Not Be What You Think It Is

Grrrrrr. It fools me every time and happens all too frequently at the easel.

I will try to keep a camera handy and make an effort to “grab” this problem as it arises so you can recognize that thorny old “the problem isn’t what you think it is….it is probably the opposite” situation.

The problem is often a light/dark thing.

Above is a 6″ x 9″ oil sketch of a cement angel by Gaudi that I recently saw in Barcelona. So far so good.

I finish the dead underpainting layer (raw umber and titanium white) and there isn’t much contrast in my reference photo…it’s made out of cement after all. However, I fail to capture the “sculptural” quality.

What to do? I glaze it and build lots of light. And then I build some more and it isn’t working.

But then I realize that it isn’t LIGHT that is the problem…it is that the darks are not dark enough.

So I stop working on the light and pay attention to the dark. . . duh . . . and then I get it right.

The light is unchanged in the last two pictures…but the dark has become much darker and thus it works now.

Although I am getting better, I’d say that I still guess wrong about once a week and think that:

1. The lights aren’t light enough
or
2. The darks aren’t dark enough

But the answer is frequently the opposite of what I think it is.

UPDATE: This is the final painting ( just couldn’t leave it alone).

I picked up the brush to add a little more dark and couldn’t resist adding a little lettering in the lower right to sort of balance the odd composition.

Here’s a detail of the lettering (above).

I was once a sign painter before I took up oil painting….and I love lettering.

This little 6″x9″ Gaudi Angel oil sketch will be part of a fundraiser for the Portrait Society of America.

About Karin

Karin Wells is an artist of amazing versatility. She graduated with honors from both the New England School of Art and Design, Boston, 1965, and the Butera School of Art, Boston, 1986. Karin has enjoyed a career as an award-winning graphic designer, illustrator and sign painter. She also taught Life Drawing and Painting for many years. She has most recently studied for three years at The New England School of Classical Painting in Greenfield, New Hampshire, under the direction of Numael Pulido.

To expand her craft, Karin has traveled throughout Europe studying the Old Masters. Her art reflects the deep influence of these great works. Karin demonstrates a remarkable facility for likeness and for the use of light.

The artist is a member of The American Society of Portrait Artists, Portrait Society of America, The Portrait Society of Atlanta, and The Copley Society of Boston.

To learn more about Karin and to view more of her amazing work, be sure to visit her website and blog by following the links below:

Website: http://www.karinwells.com/

Blog: http://karinwells.blogspot.com/

If you would like to be notified when Karin updates her blog, be sure to click the “Follow” link in the upper left hand corner of her blog.

Add Pure Color into Reflected Light

When I can, I like to “get away” with adding thick intense pure color into reflected light (under the nose and chin for example).

So often you can “hide” a bright pure color in plain sight – and nobody will notice it until you point it out.

In my Portrait of Zabie, above, I have added a brush stroke of pure cadmium orange – straight from the tube – underneath her chin.

I define “pure color” as a color without any addition of white to “dilute” it. Instead of adding white, I usually adjust the value (lightness or darkness) of this color with something lighter – usually yellow ochre pale in order to allow it to blend in with the surrounding tones. I am talking about thick paint here – not a glazed color.

I prefer to use the warm colors from my palette – reds, yellows and cadmium orange. But there is no reason not to use the cool colors if it serves the image.

Pure color can greatly enliven and enrich a painting. I try to find as many excuses to use pure color whenever and wherever I can.

Reflected light can be “toned down or neutralized” a bit by mixing two color opposites (i.e., red/green, purple/yellow) if necessary. If a cooler color is required, you can add a dab of white and/or blue to “cool” the mixture. Sorry, I do not have an example of this handy.

Note that if you’re not careful, you can lighten an area too much and run the risk of fragmenting a solid shadow – always a no no.

Although the accepted knowledge is that “reflected light” is actually reflected from a color specific object nearby, I seldom pay much attention to this.

I say that whatever color looks good and you can get away with..go for it! Painting is not meant to be reality. “Reality” is mostly the task of photography.

Detail of my Portrait of Elizabeth Brewer. I used a streak of nearly pure cadmium orange both under the chin and in the earlobe on the left.

Detail of my Portrait of Whitney. I have added more yellow and a touch of blue here in order to tone it down.

A detail of my Portrait of Gwyneth. I used a little more yellow to tone it down under the nose and chin to avoid overpowering those delicate skin tones. Toward the ear, I used straight-from-the-tube undiluted cadmium orange.

About Jon Friedman

Jon R. Friedman was born in 1947 in Washington, D.C.  He graduated from Princeton University with Bachelor of Arts Degree and received a Master of Fine Arts Degree from Cranbrook Art Academy located in Michigan.

Jon R. Friedman paints landscapes, figure paintings, and commissioned portraits. He also creates assemblages and constructions and site-specific installations. Friedman has studios in both New York City and Cape Cod, Massachusetts. See Jon Friedman’s Resumé for more information.

Follow this link to visit Jon’s Website

Paint Water and Sky with Jon R. Friedman

One Clean Sweep:

Before beginning Low Tide, Sunrise, I decided that the essence of the image should be an instantaneous, panoramic sweep. “I wanted the painting to smack the viewer’s eye with an elemental immediacy, first presenting a luminous triad of air, earth, and water — and then releasing the viewer to linger over details of tone and texture. ”

Five-Step Demo

1. Composition Sketch

After priming my canvas with acrylic gesso, I sketched my composition with a diluted acrylic wash. Nibbling away at the image with brushes wouldn’t give me the fast feeling of dramatic, holistic color chords I wanted, so I decided to use my Iwata spray gun. With masking tape and plastic sheeting, I covered the beach and water and then sprayed on the intial sky color with Golden liquid acrylic. In this photo the plastic has been pulled away, showing the first application of color. Before moving on, I remasked and continued spraying until I was fully satisfied with the sky.

2. Basic Coloring

Next I covered the sky and sprayed the basic light blue-gray color of the water over the lower canvas. My studio doesn’t have a good exhaust system so I worked on the initial stages of the canvas outside.

3. Frisket Paper

Moving inside, I laid the canvas flat on a tabletop and adhered prepared frisket paper (waterproof tracing paper with an adhesive backing) to the painting’s surface. Over the next few days, I cut the tidal-pool and runnel shapes from the paper with a frisket knife—which has a blade that rotates 360 degrees for cutting intricate shapes. The transparent frisket paper allowed me to see my acrylic sketch underneath, but because this sketch was rough, I was drawing and composing as I cut.

When I finished cutting, I pulled away the frisket surrounding the pools and runnels and then sprayed the exposed beach areas with dark, gray-browns. In this photo, the spraying is finished, and the tape, plastic and frisket-paper mask are removed. The basic color chords and the fundamental divisions of the composition are in place.

4. Blending

I used oils and a variety of brushes for the clouds, which feel “meaty” and tactile compared to the spray-painted sky. To intensify the lower right of the sky, I mixed my colors with Grumbacher Alkyd painting medium and blended them into the spray-painted sky, using a variety of soft, fan-shaped brushes. For the subtle tonalities and tide-carved surface of the beach, I dragged and pressured paint onto the canvas with silicone-tipped Colour Shapers (Royal Sovereign). These let me create precise edges, where one color butts against another, and also smear colors together seamlessly—so the beach appears shaped by the surf rather than assembled from calculated brushstrokes.

5. Finishing Touches

Dragging and blending paint across an 8-foot horizontal canvas is an almost athletic activity, and the workability of the paint changes from moment to moment, resulting in a kind of give-and-take wrestling match. After about an hour, the paint is too dry to continue manipulating. The final appearance of the beach is the result of many built-up layers, leading to a dense, subtly striated opacity that stands in marked contrast to the sky’s transparent luminosity.

Originally I had included the diminutive figure of a fisherman off to the left, like a visual staple joining beach, water and sky. In the end, I eliminated the figure because it was too much of a visual magnet, preventing the eye from roaming freely along the beach in Low Tide, Sunrise (acrylic and oil, 30×96).

By Philip Howe

The following oil painting demonstration is courtesy of Philip Howe . When you are finished viewing this demonstration, please take a moment to visit Philip’s site to view more of his artwork and to learn more about him.

You may also be interested in Philip’s New Book:

“Angels – The Artwork of Philip Howe”

This book is 134 full-color pages of the beautiful artwork of Philip Howe. The reproductions are from his spiritual and dream series of oil paintings, with dozens of images, exclusive close-up shots from the originals, and over 40 pages of demonstrations for artists and collectors. It is printed on soft matte paper, the same as our quality prints, so the color is rich and clean, with each spread designed to fit the images.

Follow this link for more details on the book.

The Old Conquistador – Oil Painting Portrait Demo

This portrait was done as more of an experiment to play with traditional techinques using a solid brown underpainting and a fairly tight painting style. My friend John posed for the piece and tried his best to look mean, but its just not in him. I hope this shows some expression of feeling for what the old soldiers must have felt in seeing a new world being torn apart yet knowing their own aging and destiny in troubled times. I may do more images of past figures, it was certainly fun to do.

Pencil drawing used to project onto canvas

Pencil line with thin reddish brown oil was, then let dry overnight

Heavy oil with liquin medium washed over then let to dry overnight

Burnt umber browns for underpainting base

The first 3 images are really just about an hours worth of work, with an overnight drying time in between each stage. Basically I used an oil wash with mineral spirits to tone the raw canvas and seal the thin pencil drawing. This piece is only 20×30″ and I often do quick studies this size to break from larger paintings, so I am in a habit of doing them in a few quick stages. The second image uses liquin mixed with a heavier wash and the 3rd image, above, uses liquin medium with burnt umber to form a base value, both drying faster by the use of the medium and set in front of a fan overnight.

Black and darker brown over the dry brown underpainting

First opaques added

More opaques added, arm redrawn and some color begins

More redrawing of the arm, further color

Background gray added, first pass

Background futher blocked in, ready for overpainting of 2nd darker layer

At this point most of the base values are in and I can begin to darken the painting. Since I don’t have to worry about the drawing any more, I can concentrate on the feeling and density of the next layers to enhance the realism overall. The difference between this stage and the final, below, is 4 or 5 layers of transparent paint, carefully built up to form a rich overall tone, especially in the skin and background areas. Browns work especially well to create a golden patina and there are several paint makers now offering a range of quality transparent hues. I especially like the ones from Dan Smith. If you have questions of specific colors used, I can list them here for future reference, although its the translucent combination of colors, red over brown over a golden ochre, even some transparent blue to deepen the shadows, that give the overall tone, not just brown on a white or gray base.

The Old Conquisador 20x30" oil on canvas

Head detail. Note the dense skin tones built up from 4 or 5 layers over the base flesh

About Brian MacNeil

Brian MacNeil is an artist of great talent and imagination and is one of the new generation of Realist painters that are the new avant-garde in the art world. Brian studied at the Angel Academy of Art, Florence, from 2004 to 2008 and showed himself to be an extremely gifted student, understanding, as though instinctively, what his instructors were teaching…

Learn more about Brian and view of his work by visiting his Websites:

http://brianmacneil.com/

http://brianmacneil.blogspot.com/

Master Copy Challenge by Brian MacNeil

(Click Images For Larger View)

Master copies have always been a joy for me. I feel I am really able to learn the language of oil painting by trying to reproduces these amazing works. With each painting I witness may vocabulary broadening with new understanding of how the materials flow. Another benefit I’ve found with Master Copies is a new sense of design. The painters of the past, well at least the painters I look up to seem to portray there subjects with more style and vigor. For example the elegance of many Van Dyke’s portraits is experienced by the elongation of the body, more commonly noticed in the neck and hands he paints. On the other hand the artist Rembrandt designed many of his figures quit stubby and round. In Rembrandt and his many self-portraits the drawing of one is often rather different from an other.

The beautiful and amazing thing is that no matter which portrait you are looking at you know it is him. Rembrandt has a way of presenting an intimate scene were we relate and feel apart of. I once heard a story about Annigoni where a lot of his portraits didn’t look much like the sitter. The point wasn’t so much to get a photo realistic image of the persons but there essence. The part of the person that is felt and not seem by eyes. A sentiment that one feels like a memory or a dream. I believe that is why so many flocked to have there portraits done by Annigoni. They wanted to be transformed into something deeper then the way they looked.

So the importance of Master Copies is that they provide you with information that painting from life cannot. There are tricks and techniques that are not always visible in nature so one can either get real creative or look back to the masters to help us tell our stories. They teach us how to paint lips, what edges to blur, and open our eyes to see what colors are used to make a white drapery.

The Cornelis Van Der Geest has been one of my favorites since I first laid eyes on it. Even today it still gives me goose bumps looking into the gaze of it’s eyes. Every time that I am in London I go straight to the National Gallery to see it like i’m visiting an old friend. I never get tired of it. It becomes a new painting every time I study it. Often it makes me want to give up painting all together when I think about the fact that at the age of 19 Van Dyke painted this marvelous and sophisticated head.

First off i made a pencil drawing to place all the features to get familiar with the shapes and tonal relationships. I find it useful to make this drawing first because the whole time that I am drawing I am imaging my plan of attack. It may seem like an extra step but in my experience it saves me time in the long run. By the time I have brush in hand I have already painted it several times in my head working out all the kinks.

basic block-in

pencil drawing heightened with chalk

After I have transferred the drawing to canvas I use Raw Umber and Lead White to tone and lighten the drawing. I am in a way making a map for my self to follow later on with color. In this study this is the last time I will use Raw Umber.

The underpainting

I left the painting to dry over night and to be economical with time I started in at the lower portion of the head letting the opaque passages of white dry a little bit longer. The colors I have chosen are limited to just Lead White, Yellow Ocher, Burnt Siena and Ivory Black. Also I am using a Sun-Thicken linseed oil medium that I have been told was used by both Rubens and Van Dyke.

First placements of color

In this stage of the painting I have a majority of the colors and tones placed. I’ll spend the next day or so fixing the drawing and adjusting the tones and colors. I am very careful no to work too add much color to the forehead at this point. I have keyed the values lighter there with some heavy impastos. I did this because I wanted the the forehead to be of lighter value and higher chroma. To get that affect I will carefully make thin semi-opaque passes over the forehead. Modeling the forms just enough not to end up mud.

Color and tones

More correcting and modeling of small forms. The fancy brush stokes I leave out until I am confident enough that the drawing, hues and tones are relatively in the right places.

smaller forms being modeled

Now with all the guess work behind me I decided to repaint the entire head all over again. I wanted all of the strokes of paint to be painted into the one beside it. Also I was noticing that the flesh was looking a little dull and grey. I tend to like broken color and cooler flesh tones in paintings but this to me as it was lacking uniformity and life. I repainted the head and half the collar in a day. I haven’t touched it since because other paintings are taking up my time.

The unfinished end result

Thank you very much for viewing this work. You may check out the Pushing Pigments Blog to see other artist take on this same task.