Friday, October 16, 2009

Dougie and the Ducky

Last night's still life study was to paint a bright yellow toy duck. I'm extremely happy with way that he turned out. Using the techniques that I learned a couple of weeks ago from my instructor, Karen Winslow, about thinking of the entire painting as a mosaic and then blending the edges, really really helps.

As usual, I toned the canvas board with a mixture of greys, burnt umber, yellow ochre, and a small amount of Liquin. Then I drew the toy using Terra Rosa.

Once I had the general shape of the duck laid out, I removed all of the background paint in the area of the duck. This saves me from fighting with the background paint so that my duck is bright and luminous. After that, it was a matter of laying down the base color shapes and mixing various levels of grey to create the shadows.

The hardest part of this was to ensure that the drawing was correct. If the perspective was done incorrectly, the toy would not look near as well. No matter how well you paint, if you can't get the perspective correct, the painting will be wrong (if you are going for a realistic approach).

No comments:

Post a Comment