Painting on Canvas (Red Tulip)
Name: Robin Reich
Date and Time:
2016.03.07, 11:00pm
Location: Making and Knowing LabSubject: Dead Layer, Mid-tone, and Highlights
- I began with a canvas that had been primed using rabbit skin glue, red earth, and finally a base layer of lead white
- when the lead white was dry, I transferred an image onto the canvas using the pouncing method
- due to time restrictions, I did not outline the pouncing dots with yellow ochre oil paint - had I done this, the lines within the flower might have been easier to paint later, but it may also have made the outlines harder to replicate neatly
- instead, I immediately laid down the "dead layer", a coating of cadmium acrylic (so it would dry faster than oil), over the entire interior of the flower, including the area covered by the stamens. I did this using a very small round brush, which made a fairly textured surface, but that ultimately did not make a difference.
- instead, I immediately laid down the "dead layer", a coating of cadmium acrylic (so it would dry faster than oil), over the entire interior of the flower, including the area covered by the stamens. I did this using a very small round brush, which made a fairly textured surface, but that ultimately did not make a difference.
- I next laid down the yellow tones on the flower with a very small round brush, using yellow ochre in oil, mixed using a muller. I used yellow on every segment with a yellow tone, with the intention of using the next lightest tone on top of some of these areas.
- To make the mid-tone yellow, I blended equal parts of the yellow ochre oil paint with a pre-mixed lead white oil paint. Using the same brush, I went back over the yellow ochre layer anywhere that appeared lighter. The only pitfall to this method was that I ended up enlarging some of the yellow stripes on the tulip, but this was also due to having a brush that was slightly too large for the fine details. I made up for this in the next layer by flattening the brush to create a thinner edge. Using the thinner edge, I applied a layer of almost entirely lead white - it had a small amount of yellow ochre which had been left on the brush. I applied this white layer on the brightest highlights in thin strokes, on both the yellow portions and the red portions.
Name: Robin Reich
Date and Time:
2016.03.08, 09:30am
Location: Making and Knowing LabSubject: Shadows and Background
- when I returned to the lab, my paints were still wet, since they had been drying for less than 24 hours. I decided to paint in the shadows anyway, since Erma Hermens had suggested painting in that order (highlights then shadows) and it seemed like none of the shadows would interfere with the still-wet highlights.
- the historical method instructed us to use a mixture of vermillion with red lake for the mid tone, and vermillion, red lake, and a brown pigment for the darkest shadows. It did not instruct how to paint the almost black tones needed for the stamens and background
- I mulled together equal parts venetian red and red (madder) lake with cold-pressed linseed oil for the mid tones, and then this same mixture with the addition of iron oxide for the shadows. For the darkest tones, I combined iron oxide with brazilwood, which has a dark purple-brown hue. I also mulled some brazilwood and cochineal with linseed individually to see whether those colors would be useful on their own
- I mulled together equal parts venetian red and red (madder) lake with cold-pressed linseed oil for the mid tones, and then this same mixture with the addition of iron oxide for the shadows. For the darkest tones, I combined iron oxide with brazilwood, which has a dark purple-brown hue. I also mulled some brazilwood and cochineal with linseed individually to see whether those colors would be useful on their own
- using the copy of the original painting as a reference, I painted strokes of mid tones using a very small round brush (the same as yesterday). As with the ochre, I put this layer anywhere that seemed even slightly darker than the dead layer. I immediately found that the white and yellow layers were still wet, and that in some cases I was running through them. This was a happy accident, because it helped me to discover how to get the tones in between the dead layer and the highlights - they simply mixed and streaked on the canvas when I accidentally pulled the white pigment along with a red brush. Discovering this enabled me to actually push the yellow and white layers around a little and reclaim some space for the red layer that had been covered up by white or yellow.
- Next, I used a very small square brush to apply the shadow layer. I chose this brush because I found when I was painting the highlights that I could get the cleanest lines by flattening my brush into a chisel shape, so beginning with a brush in that shape (and with shorter bristles) seemed to make sense. The one problem with this portion was that my paints were a little too oily, and so some of the darkest shadows were hard to layer because the paint itself was so wet that the pigment was getting pushed around on the canvas. This is where the brazilwood came in handy, since its dark purple helped to accentuate the darkest shadows. Again, I was able to expand some of the reds using the shadow color, which, since it was still mixing with the white a bit, was resulting in a closer shade to the dead layer than the mid tone color had.
- Because I never outlined the pouncing with yellow, I had absolutely no guidelines for the stamens and had to freehand them. I used the darkest tone I mixed and the round brush again. This worked beautifully for the stamens and the bit of background that shows through the middle of the flower - when my brush again caught a little white, it actually created the slight highlight at the base of the stamen. I used this same brush to outline the flower as I was applying the background, and I intended to apply the rest of the background using a much larger brush, but found that the color lacked body and that too much of the color was soaked up by the large brush, so I applied the entire background with the small brush instead.
The final product, up against the original:
