Having taking several classes last winter at Galeria del Sol, I was excited to find a teacher, Calum Cameron, that I really enjoyed working with and also that introduced me to a different style and method of painting. Like me, he loves bright colours and Mexican life, many of his paintings include figures, which is something I love to do too.
I will begin here with a description of the project I am currently working on at the studio. I took a photo of some young children dancing at the Mexican Constitution celebration last winter and I am using one as a refernece for this painting. I like the strong contrast of lights and darks, one of the challenges is that the young boy is in shadow and this will be a challenge to render so that the viewer can see some detail without losing the effect of the shadowing. Now, I will start off saying that instead of following Calum's technique of first painting the whole canvas your darkest colour, I thought I would save time and work on the white canvas - that is a mistake, now I am scrambling to add my dark values in first which help to determine your lights and mid values.
Day 1. Drawing the image on the canvas.
I will begin here with a description of the project I am currently working on at the studio. I took a photo of some young children dancing at the Mexican Constitution celebration last winter and I am using one as a refernece for this painting. I like the strong contrast of lights and darks, one of the challenges is that the young boy is in shadow and this will be a challenge to render so that the viewer can see some detail without losing the effect of the shadowing. Now, I will start off saying that instead of following Calum's technique of first painting the whole canvas your darkest colour, I thought I would save time and work on the white canvas - that is a mistake, now I am scrambling to add my dark values in first which help to determine your lights and mid values.
Day 1. Drawing the image on the canvas.
Here I began painting, starting with the boy's shirt. I started with paynes grey as the dark base but was not too happy with the muted khaki colours i was getting, even though they were similar to those in the reference photo. Instead I started using Magentas and that gave a much richer, warmer colour, that was added in various areas and i subsequently altered some of the other tones to go along with it. I used yellow oxide, magenta deep and medium, raw sienna, winsor blue and paynes grey, with added white here and there.
This is today's work. I started with the girls shirt, I was happy with the sleeve then moved to the front of the shirt but got hung up on shades and began overworking it. I decided I should leave it for a while then started on the reds to try and bring it together more. I also darkened darks and shadows. for the shirt I used cobalt, cerulean blue, white, paynes grey, a dash of cad yellow light and some magenta in the shadows. On the shirt so far I used, crimson, yellow oxide, crimson, cad red medium, paynes grey.