Court Jones: An Oil Painting Demonstration
Article Transcript
I don’t like the term “How-to” when it comes to demonstrating an artistic method. “How-to” instructions are for furniture assembly manuals. It would be a little bit presumptive for anyone to say “This is how you are supposed to draw or paint something.” So instead of this being a “How-to-paint” article, think of this more as a “How I paint” article. Or more appropriately: “How I usually paint when creating a portrait to be photographed for printing in a magazine” because that is what I was thinking as I worked on this piece.
I often focus on different goals each time I stand in front of the easel. In this particular painting demonstration of a Morgan Freeman caricature portrait, I begin with a detailed line drawing and attempt to create a realistic rendering, with some minor painterly touches and visible brush strokes. At other times, I might work with no line drawing at all and focus more on creating interesting edges or color harmonies. Other times, I may only want to spend thirty minutes on a painting to capture a quick impression or gesture. The important thing is to have a goal and a finished look in mind when starting a painting, and then modify the procedure to achieve that look.
And I can’t emphasize enough how important fundamental drawing skills are in painting. When you begin any painting, you usually quickly obscure any line drawing that is on the canvas. So you must be able to find the correct shapes again and again, and you will need to correct the drawing and likeness as you go. You can’t separate drawing from painting; they are one and the same. When you lay down a paint stroke, that stroke must have a shape. So that is a type of drawing. And being able to design good shapes is a skill you develop through years of training. If your drawing skills are not adequate, you will not produce successful paintings.
First, it is important to find a painting surface that works well for you. There are many choices out there, from smoothly gessoed hardboards to fine or coarsely woven canvases and linens which come in either acrylic or oil primed finishes. I personally like a fine grain linen surface with lead oil priming. There is not a heavy grain which tends to cause lots of little reflections when photographing the work for print. Lead-primed linen is generally more expensive than cotton canvas, but it takes the paint more cooperatively without absorbing too much into the surface. I like a little bit of texture on the canvas, but not so much as to be distracting from the brush strokes. For this painting, I am using Raphael Oil Primed Linen which I purchased on the roll. It’s a very slick surface which requires me to use softer sable brushes more often than the stiffer hog’s hair bristle brushes.
Preparing the Canvas
Before I begin any painting, one of the things that I always do consistently is stain
the canvas with a thinned down mixture of a brown and blue in order to get a warm
grey/brown even tone. It is easier to judge the values accurately when you eliminate
the glaring bright white of the canvas from the beginning. A common problem I see in
many novice painters’ works is that the flesh colors are often too light in value. This is
caused by the artist judging the value of the flesh adjacent to the bright white canvas.
A white background tricks the eye into thinking that any color you apply to the surface
is much darker than it really is. But in reality the value of skin tone is often right in the
middle of the value scale, rather than towards the lighter end.
Palette
My mixing palette is glass with a sheet of warm grey paper underneath,
which is a close match to the color and value of the stained
tone I apply to a canvas. In order to have the colors and values I apply
to the canvas look the same as they do on my palette, it is important
to have the backgrounds of each to be similar. My colors, listed from
left to right: Ultramarine Blue, Sap Green, Burnt Sienna, Alizarin Crimson
Permanent, Cadmium Red Medium, Cadmium Orange, Lemon
Yellow and Titanium White.
Drawing
After the canvas stain is dry, I then apply the drawing to the
canvas. In this instance, I drew the original caricature of
Morgan Freeman on a small sheet of paper. Then I scanned
it in to Photoshop and printed out a larger version to fit onto
a 16 x 20 inch canvas. I then use a sheet of graphite paper
to transfer the line drawing onto the canvas. I use a hard
red pencil so that I can easily see the lines which I have
already traced.
Painting
Sometimes the lines transferred into
the canvas by the graphite paper
are very light, so I then use a thin
pointy bristle brush to apply Burnt
Sienna thinned down with odorless
mineral spirits to darken and
reinforce those lines. I have found it
necessary to do this if I want to preserve
my original drawing as long
as possible during the oil painting
process. In the next step I will apply
dark color stains, which would have
quickly obscured or even dissolved
away the light graphite lines.
I apply rich, dark colors thinned down with odorless mineral spirits (OMS). The colors are darker and more intense than will appear on the finished canvas. But they will help add color variety and interest when they show through in areas. I thin the paint with OMS because it helps them to dry faster and lets some of the original canvas luminosity show through the paint. Plus, it is important to remember the rule of painting “fat over lean” when working with oils. The linseed oil in paints is basically a type of fat. The more you dilute it with a solvent like OMS, you are making the paint more “lean.” So the thinner leaner pigments should be applied first. And then the “fatter” undiluted paints can be painted over them. This will help ensure the paint layers dry properly without cracking.
In this next step, I add a darker brown stain to the background so that I can better judge the new darker values on the face. I also start to apply more opaque “fat” paint on the shadowed half of the face. This is the part where it really starts to feel like true artistic painting. I am using only soft sable brushes at this stage. And I am trying to indicate the various plane changes and thinking about things on the large scale. Details do not interest me yet. One of the most important things I have learned about how to paint is to focus on the big picture and overall value relationships for the first half of the painting. Do not let yourself become seduced with details and rendering too early or you risk creating a disjointed badly structured portrait.
Here, I continue to add more opaque paint in other areas without getting too focused on a single area. I try to stand far back from the canvas and keep the overall relationships working well. The paint is applied in small “color tiles” (pretend you are laying down color mosaic tiles) with very little mixing or blending of edges. You must not overblend oil paints or you will soon get a muddy soup of browns or an unattractive airbrushed look. Oil paints stay wet for a long time and it is tempting to blend. But you will lose all sense of structure if you blend too much. You can achieve smooth transitions between values and colors simply by applying the correct intermediate value and color in between the larger color tiles. The foundation color for all of my flesh tones when painting any ethnicity is Burnt Sienna. It can be mixed with a red and white for lighter flesh tones, or cooled down and darkened with Ultramarine Blue. It is a very versatile color which can be bent any direction you like by adding other colors.
At this stage, I have almost all of the face covered with large flat color tiles. So I begin getting into some of the detail work around the eye. My technique still is to apply color tiles, but now they are much smaller and I blend just a little bit here and there to help give variety to the edges. Sometimes I use a clean brush to soften an edge or even a finger to wipe an area. Manipulation of the edges between colors and values is where the illusion of three dimensional reality occurs as well as some of the personal style of the artist.
Here I have continued to add more refinement and details by layering smaller color tiles over the rest of the face. I am waiting to apply the lightest values and highlights until near the end. This will give time for the darker under-layers to dry so that I can keep the lighter values clean without contamination by darker wet paint. Also you can see that I chose to use a middle value color for the background. It is lighter than the shadow side of the face, but darker than the light side of the face. By doing this, I maintain a good contrast and the face pops out of the background. Some of the warm brown canvas stain shows through in areas.
I am now in the final stages of painting the face, where I add the lightest values in the hair and other highlights. Frequently, I stand far back to judge the overall effect. If there are any areas which call too much attention to themselves or any problems with edges or shapes, I can easily modify them because the paint is still wet. I did the original drawing transfer and canvas staining on one day, allowed it to dry overnight and then did all of the opaque wet painting on the second day. It’s best to work quickly wet into wet if you want to have control over the soft and hard edges. Here, in Southern California’s dry climate, oil paints dry very quickly and become unworkable after a few hours. So it’s necessary to get large sections of a canvas done in a single day’s work.
The clothing did not take very long. I spent an additional hour or so on that. Overall, I spent about nine to ten hours painting this caricature portrait. The main lessons I hope to convey in sharing my procedure are: having a clear goal or finished look in mind before beginning, solving the bigger problems first before solving the smaller ones, and understanding that oil painting requires following a procedure of layering and a disciplined application of paint strokes. You can’t let your focus drift away. That leads to making sloppy or poor decisions. But really, the only poor decisions you can make in painting are using the wrong value, shape or edge than the situation calls for. Color hue and saturation are issues too, but are not as important as the first three elements of values, shapes and edges. The guiding principles of oil painting are simple in theory, but applying them well is the tricky part. That’s why getting proper instruction where the ideas are reinforced through constant repetition and numerous life studies are so essential.
Recommended Materials:
Court paints on Raphael Double Oil
Primed Linen or Claessen’s #13 Double
Primed Portrait Linen using Robert
Simmons Signet bristle brushes and
Royal Langnickle Sable brushes. His
solvent is Gamsol Odorless Mineral
Spirits. The brand of paint varies
and is not very important. But Court
recommends using only professional
grade oil paints. Not the more diluted
“academic” or “student” grade paints.
Court Jones works as an illustrator, portrait artist and instructor at the Watts Atelier of the Arts in San Diego, California. Find more of Court’s caricatures at www.courtjones.com. For more fine art work, see www.crjonesart.com.
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