Egg Tempera practice2

Second egg tempera practice

This time added a little oil to egg emulsion.

Support: 5 x 7 true gesso panel
Paint: egg tempera with small amount of linseed oil added.
Brush: Started with WN #7 but seemed to be ruined so switched to Princeton short liner, flat taklon for washes

using this detail from Botticelli Primavera as reference 

Transferred with graphite paper, raw umber lines with paint.

first layer with yellow ochre

vermillion

raw umber

black

used with/ white YO over to blend transitions

several more layers adding darks and then going over with lights. Tried to use washes of yellow ochre vermillion and raw umber. They paint was too eggy for a wash by itself. Next time add more oil or perhaps liquin

Egg Tempera Practice

I have recently switched back to egg tempera versus oil painting. I n both mediums I am Trying to learn the best techniques and materials for my desired results. I am finally starting to get a handle on how my brain works and realize that i am going to jump around a lot . Because of this i forget much of what I learned the last time I was using this medium and have to do the same experiments over and over. I am a little better about being prepared for the next go round such as having several gessoed panels prepared for egg tempera. That was good. But with this recent round I found i had pretty good success with a small practice painting and then I forget many of the details of how I got there such as brushes, paints etc. I have decided that i HAVE to keep a log after each painting session so I remember exactly what I did and dont have to repeat myself and waste time. In this day and age t seems thaat it is easier and more convient to do it here, so I will:

In the Library

I wanted to try out the Mixed technique one more time so I put together a few pictures for inspiration and came up with this little surrealist scene set in a library.
I used a Blick panel 18 x 24. I put together a digital sketch (different photos pieced together in photoshop) and then drew a pencil sketch to size.

                                                    Photo references

2/01/2018 white tempera on red oil

 I drew on the white panel with black ink and then painted it over with cad red oil paint. That turned out to be quite a mistake in that the red was so slick that it was hard to get new paint to stick to it. I did mix some liquin in it so it would dry faster. that combined with the pre primed acrylic gesso was not a good combo. Since then I have purchased some Fast mat oil paint designed for underpainting. We'll see how that goes.

2/05/2018 After layer of yellow was added and then more white tempera

some local color added

After much trouble with getting the new paint to cover the red I ended up with this

4/30/2018

The dog, the sofa and her hair were mainly done with tempera. After trying out a few tempera textural styles for her skin I decided just to go traditional grisaille.

Aside from technical difficulties, the next hardest thing was getting the lighting the way I wanted it since it was pieced together from different sources. 

basically it was a series of many, many layers built up until I got the look I wanted. 

During this painting I purchased an video tutorial on glazing by Will Kemp. It was extremely helpful and i used many of his techniques on this as I went along including his mediums which were various mixtures of liquin and linseed oil.

5/27/2018 finished painting

You can see I added more lighting and shadows including the window light on the floor in order to bring more depth to the painting. 

Overall, I am pleased with how it turned out. it is not exactly how I visualized it but I learned a lot through trial and error. There are a lot of things i like about using tempera and oil together. They each have their strengths and weaknesses and I am learning the best ways to use them. 

The Lady in the Library

I started this new painting before I finished "Granny at the Circus". I had to take a break because I was seeing my mom regularly for awhile before, during and after hip replacement surgery. Now it is january and she is 90% recuperated. I will go back and finish it eventually, but in the meantime I have this one.
I wanted to keep track of the steps since I dont know what i am doing and there is a lot of experimenting.

This is the completion of the first stage. 

 Ink drawing covered by red oil paint. Painted with white tempera. I mixed some liquin with the red paint and I think it made this layer too glossy. I ordered some FastMatte alkyd paint from Blick which i used in the next stage.

This is the second stage. I painted the whole thing with the Fastmatte yellow paint thinned only with OMS. The paint dried a little strange. I think it had a hard time adhering to the red glossy paint. It took several days and left a film of yellow powder that rubbed off. But after that it seemed ok. i will have too see how it is over other fastmatte paint.

White highlights added to yellow.

Local color glazes. Earth red for the wooden bookcase. Quinacridone rose seems to work well with the yellow for skintone, we will see. And Quinacridone violet on her dress. Thats it for today.

Little Girls cont

So I worked a long time going back and forth on how to approach this but i decided just to jump in and i will learn how to draw separately.

This is what i got and posted to facebook:

girls October 7

Which i was pretty happy with but the next day I looked at it and knew Sofia was all wrong, so after much measuring and comparing I started her whole head over. It was in the wrong place and everything , also maddie's arm. I put in the correct placement for for them but i had to let it dry so in the meantime i worked on the background. once those parts are dry I will fix it up.

Girls October 8

Oil Portrait

Oil portrait-
Im trying to do something different. I was inspired to try to do a painting of my nieces. One thing lead to another and I ended up wanting to create something between a Renoir and a Sargent. Like these:

This is what I have so far:

Before I begin working on the faces i wanted to do a study or two so I could make most of my mistakes ahead of time. I started with maddie.

 

 This is a tracing of the differences between the photo and the painting. Examining them both i can see that Ive gotten a lot better at the individual parts but it is their relation to each other I have to work on. The bottom part of the face lines up pretty well with the overall shape of the head. The shape of the eyes themselves is not too bad either but the are in the wrong place. I will have to figure out how to improve that. It may even have something to do with the height of the painting on the easel. I want to be able to block things in with a bigger brush like your suppose to and not count on little tiny marks with little tiny brushes like Im used to.

PS: I am happy with the colors for the most part which were :
Burnt umber
Burnt sienna
Cad red light
Yellow ochre
touches of raw sienna and raw umber

Granny at the Circus cont...

Ok, so Ive been working pretty regularly for a couple of days cause I dont have to work and Sarah is off school and it is too damn hot to go anywhere.

So this is yesterday's:

I went back in with the tempera on several areas. I did a few local color glazes. The biggest problem I am Having is the stupid brush. I once again forgot to clean my Winsor Newton Series 7 and even though I got all the paint out, it will never be the same. It's totally splayed and I can't make a good point with it. Today I tried using the tempera brush for part of the time (Winsor Newton University from Amazon) it synthetic so its a little springier and not so soft. Its been fine for what I did today but its not a very good blender. I will have to try the blick sable, they are alot cheaper.

Here is what I did all day today:

I mostly worked on the ringmaster and the showgirl's clothes. I started to do a little in the back. I'm afraid the floor is a little too dark and I'm not sure how to lighten it. If I want it to be more subtle I think I can go over it with white and then a color and bring the whole thing up. I guess I will give it a try.