The Art of Frank Gallimore - Blog

CODA Girl 6: Eyes

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:04:09 UTC

Here's a bit of a retrospective:

CODA Girl 5: Finishing the head

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:44:15 UTC

When I stopped painting the head last, I roughed in some black and asphaltam darks along the core shadow of the head, intending to paint in more of a gradation later. My most recent session consisted of putting those finishing touches of shadow and continuity on the face and neck. Once that was done, I painted in the darkest linework on the dress. Forgive some of the glare.

CODA Girl 4

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:35:10 UTC

Normally, I'd move on to complete the full underpainting of the figure. However, at times I prefer to finish off a certain section completely before painting the rest. This is rather subjective. My reasoning here was that I wanted more confidence in the painting. Finishing the head would give me a better idea of what values and strokes I want to apply to the rest of the painting. On a different day, I might be more inclined to keep everything in the same phase.

So, without further ado, here's the start of the face. I decided to work with the girl's left eye first, adding some blues and greens for interest, darkening the iris and the eyelashes even more, sharpening some of the edges and shadows. Once that was done, I brought in some burnt sienna mixed with a bit of cad yellow and white. Around the cheeks, I darkened the sienna with some cad red. I could have used indian red instead of this mixture but I felt like limiting my palette. Around the edges of shadow, the far round edges of the forehead and so on, I mixed some asphaltam into the burnt sienna. I don't like to lay down unbroken masses of color without some complements and contrasts to add interest. In this painting I'm adding subtle tints of green here and there, keeping in mind that green is a complement to purple (which, if things go well, should dominate this painting.)

CODA Girl 3

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:12:09 UTC

Once I laid in all the darkest darks, I started adding a bit of white to the Asphaltam and roughed in some medium values. Once that was done, I put in my lights and finished the grisaille, or underpainting, of the head.

CODA Girl 2

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 23:50:21 UTC

At this point, I've decided that the canvas is a bit too intimidating still. My quick fix is to put in a loose wash to add texture and interest on the canvas while also eliminating that annoying white. Now my values will be easier to manage. I'm considering this painting a work on the key of purple. First I sprayed the drawing with some fixative so I wouldn't lose it. Then I mixed some Cad Red and Pthalo Blue, diluted it with Galkyd and Gamsol.

The wash turned out to be too light but I liked some of the texture left behind. I felt comfortable enough to go on to the next step. Ordinarily, though, I try to move as slowly as possible. Most of the time, when I finish a work, I end up feeling as if I should have moved slower, was more careful on each step...

I started with a grisaille of the head. I used Asphaltam oil paint by Gamblin for all the darkest darks.

C.O.D.A. Girl

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 23:42:27 UTC

This one will be one of my longer projects. The other day I spent about seven hours painting the face alone. CODA stands for Child Of Deaf Adults, which is what I am. I wanted to create a figure that would convey a sense of courage and strength, while at the same time embodying a certain innocence. I typically don't think of my work in such trite terms but I just felt like it this time and that's one of the great pleasures of painting.

For this one, I relied on a combination of influences by William Whitaker, Tony Ryder, and others. I started with a pencil drawing on paper of the girl's head You can find that in the Life Drawings section. I then gathered more references for the dress and used my own hands, altered to look smaller, more feminine. The next step was to create a charcoal drawing on the canvas. See below:

This took a lot of measuring, double- and triple-checking with my references, and lots of trial-and-error. Even then, I can still see some proportion issues I didn't catch early enough in the process to fix them. Still, rather than spend twenty years on one painting, I find it's more productive to learn as much as one can while moving on, the goal being always to do better than the last one. In that sense, I am developing the artist I want to become, rather than just a single work of art.

A this point I felt I'd done enough to prepare myself and was ready to throw some paint down, keeping in mind the comfort of knowing that the "drawing phase" wasn't actually over. Painting itself is a kind of drawing too.

Portrait Study-2

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 04:20:17 UTC

Portrait Study

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 04:12:30 UTC

Chaos Monkey, take four

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 23:50:16 UTC

In this go-round, I decided to keep bumping the contrast using other tools beside ink and graphite. I went back in with some white gouache using a very old kolinsky sable brush that still manages to hold a point despite how much I've abused it. I strengthened the highlights again and then I dimmed the white with a touch of gray and blue just to add more transition between the brightest lights into the middle tones.

Then I had some fun with the fur, going back and forth between full and dimmed highlights as well as a bit of graphite here and there to make the shimmer of fur more believable. This turned out to be my favorite part of the process, that and the tongue.

Speaking of the tongue: I like to stand back from a painting every so often to see what I'm missing. Standing back forces your eye to concentrate on large shapes and the agreements between them. Also, it allows you to squint a bit and get a good approximation of what shape the darkest darks have formed versus the lightest lights. In other words, it gets you to think compositionally, of the macro instead of the micro. The general shape I was going for here, by the way, was of an X. The funnel cloud rising from the lower left to the upper right while the monkey crosses it going the other way. The tongue, somewhat in the middle of the X, should be our focal point and therefore deserves the strongest contrasts and boldest color. It's not exactly geometrical but that's also what makes it interesting for me.

Anyway, having stepped back, I could see tongue and focal area around it didn't catch my eye enough to make it rise out of all the other details around it. So I added another wash of vermillion, cadmium yellow, and white just to make the tongue stand out a bit more. It turned out too red and so I dabbed at it with a wet paper towel to remove some of the pigmentation. Then I darkened its outline some more and put the highlights back on it to make it pop. The trick then, as it is with any kind of value-bumping, was to get the picture to balance out again, now that I'd significantly sharpened the contrast in one part of it. So I went back into the fur in the chest, what I'd been planning to do anyway, increasing the interest, using some of the linework there to get the eye to point up to the face a bit. I still have to darken the edges of the eyes and nose. I won't sharpen any of the details of the legs, back, or lower body. I'd rather that fade off into the background and not compete with the ponts of interest.

Finally, I put in some highlights and linework with white gouache on the wings just to make those pop as well. The photo's not that clear but you get the idea. Just a little white here and there seemed to make them much more three-dimensional than before. Still, they're idealized, like the whole painting is, and so I'm not too concerned that it isn't photo-believeable. If you look back at the full picture of this draft, you'll see that at the end of my painting session, I loosened up by playing a bit more with the funnel cloud, adding some darker grays and wrapping them around the cloud to give it more character, depth and definition. I also washed in a lot of white around it, creating a kind of glow to frame the "darker" materials inside the picture.

Whew! That'll do for now. I'll go back and touch it up some more next week and then put it up for a while. My rule of thumb is to leave a painting alone for a week, ignore it, and then look at it again with fresh eyes to see if it still works. For example, I can already tell, after having put it down for a while over the holidays, that the eyes are a bit more "wrong" than I wanted them to be. I wanted them to look a bit out of whack but I can see now the mis-angled axes of the face (ie, the eye-line vs the mouth-line, etc) are disrupting the expressiveness I was going for. That's the tricky thing about exaggerating. And, truth be told, I'm not perfect on these proportions in my portrait work either, the stuff in which I'm trying for as much accuracy as possible. In an interview on myamericanartist.com, Scott Burdick mentioned that drawing with careful measurement and meticulous accuracy should be to the drawing student like playing the scales is to a pianist. It's not about expression or beauty, it's just about improving your chops, sharpening you skill-set with which you can then create good art. I need to practice my scales!

Chaos Monkey, take three

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 23:13:03 UTC

Yes, it took me a while to get to this next post. The holidays are my flimsy excuse. Here are the next two installments of Chaos Monkey. As I mentioned before, my plan was to fix up some of the value problems I saw by going back over a lot of the line-work with graphite. In this case, I used both a 0.7 lead mechanical pencil and a 4B drawing pencil to sharpen up the contrasts a bit. Finally, when that still didn't suit me, I cheated a bit and picked out the darkest darks with micron pigma pen. That led to a kind of outlined look, particularly in the mouth and tongue, the focal point of the picture. I also did some simple outlining work on the hands, trying to keep the line calligraphic and to work the darks gradually into the fuzzy hair lines without obscuring my points of highest contrast. I'm not entirely happy with how the hands still seem to compete a bit with the head but I think that could be resolved with more darks around the chest area to "frame" the head a bit more. As it is, it still looks pretty washed out but I'm not worried as I know there are many fun little details yet to come.