Ocelot Painting complete

It's been a while, mostly spent waiting for the painting to actually dry, but the ocelot painting is now finished!

So here's a bit of a refresher as to where the painting got to last time:

I had roughed out the greyscale underpainting ready to begin glazing in the colour. 

I started off putting the yellows in the ocelot fur along with bluer tones in the white furs. This gave the image a temporary strange green-tint to it.

Then I began putting the warmer brown tones into the fur and the pinks into the nose and ears. And, generally, just building up the colour intensity on the painting. At this point the colour started to look very flat so I worked a white fur layer back into the image and the texture of the nose. 

I tinted this with thin glazes of brown and repeated the process. Finally I added some bluey shadows to the whiskers and added some dark shades to the ocelot and background (the latter is what took so long to dry).

Here's the final outcome albeit with still a little glare that I've mostly edited out as it's so hard to photograph a shiny dark painting. I'm pretty happy with how the glazing of the colour went. The painting is in a chiaroscuro style - I've been re-learning my art terms recently, can you tell? ;) -  this is where a strong contrast between light and dark is used to convey a more dramatic image. It was particularly used in the Baroque art period by the likes of Caravaggio and Rembrandt, who's artwork I particularly liked. 

I would have liked my mark-making to be better than it was but was hampered somewhat by my photographic reference which was unfortunately a little blurred and obscured. I also need to get a couple of new brushes as my fine ones are wearing thin which makes fine details harder to put in. But the main concern I had with painting this way with colour glazes is that I wouldn't be able to build up enough depth of tone and colour and I think it turned out very well on that front.

I hope you like it.

Ocelot Painting So far..

So this is the first time I've attempted a grisaille painting method on a wildlife painting. I'm currently working on the tonal greyscale painting and then I'm going to glaze in the colour later. Here are the first three stages:

In the first stage I use diluted paint to sketch out the ocelot on the canvas along with a quick wash of the background.

Once this was dry I roughed out the base tones of the ocelot along with the markings. This stage actually took forever to dry so in future I'm thinking of adding a little liquin to the paint I'm using. Liquin is a thin medium which is added to paint for glazing but which also speeds up the drying time of paint.

This is where the painting is at following the second layer of paint. The aim at this stage was to make sure the background is dark and that the base tones, shapes, and markings of the ocelot are done to where details can then be worked in. Generally this will mean the lightest highlights and darks will not yet be present and the tones themselves are a couple of shades darker so I can put in the lighter fur details later.

First still life: Part 2 The glazing

Now that the black and white painting has been done it's time to turn my attention to glazing colour into it. To do this the colour is diluted with more oils to allow for transparency (in this case I'm using liquin) with a little medium to ensure it dries. I kept these colour glazes relatively 'pure' in that I did not dull or muddy their vibrancy by the addition of black or white paint. These are built up in layers so the transparency provides a luminescence to the painting. Each layer is allowed to dry (around a day) before a new layer is added.

A reminder to where we were at the end of the underpainting stage:

In my first layer of glazing I glaze crimson into areas of the grapes as well as some yellow. It gives the impression of a faintly tinted photograph in my opinion.

Another couple of yellow and crimson layers are put in the grapes along with adding cool blues to the glass and I add some golden brown into the foreground.

I then warmed the grapes further with red. So far I have worked the layers over the highlights largely ignoring them. The highlights were cooler, more blue in colour so I would work them later. Areas of the stem were glazed with green and then brown glazes.

I then put the highlighted areas back in to the grapes with a simple white glaze to work over later. I also glazed the foreground and background with a warm brown including the dark clear areas of glass. . glazed over blueish hues.

Finally I worked blueish glazes into the grapes and added another brown background/foreground colour glaze. I also added some more warm red to a few of the grapes to finish.

I feel pretty happy with how it turned out although it's so shiny with the liquin glazes it is very difficult to photograph. I am interested to see how this technique would work with wildlife and pet paintings and hope to give it a try soon!

Let me know what you think of my first still life attempt :)

First still life: Part 1 The underpainting

I can't be exactly sure but I think it was seven or eight years ago back in college when I last attempted a still life and never in oils. However after seeing some fantastic still lifes recently I've been wanting to give it a try, plus it gives me an opportunity to try out a different oil painting method.

The painting technique I'm trying out is called Grisaille, from the French 'gris' for grey, it involves creating a tonal black and white painting and then glazing in the colour afterwards. This does two things, first, it allows the painter to focus on tone and detail when working on the greyscale underpainting.  This makes the painting process easier as you don't need to worry about mixing various colours in tonal shades. Secondly, by building up the colour in thin layers brush strokes are softened to blend them together creating a smoother effect and a luminescent quality is added to the painting as the colours show through each glazed layer.

I usually work from start to finish in colour and deepen the tonal qualities and add detail as I go and I wanted to see whether working in this way would benefit my artwork in future.

So both inspired by some of the work I've seen (and slightly influenced by my time working at a vineyard) I raided the fridge for some grapes and grabbed a wine glass for my still life. Lighting is very important for a still life as well as the composition of elements within it so I tried a few setups to photograph before selecting one as my reference.

Here's the photo I'm using

I chose to eliminate the background entirely so the focus was solely on the subject matter especially as I didn't think the actual background of the photo would add anything to the image. Instead I would leave it dark, something like the dramatic paintings I like from Caravaggio. 

So here are the stages of me building up my greyscale underpainting.

Sketching the composition out

Adding in the first layer of background

Second background layer is added. Starting to work on the grapes and glass from rearmost to foreground

Building up the details and working on the grapes. You can start to see the textures and light now.

The finished underpainting

So far I'm pretty happy with how the painting has gone. Next step will be the colour glazing, something I'm very new to so it'll be interesting to see how it goes!