Old Spanish Trail Studio
Painting Demo ALPINE BURROS Lindy Cook Severns
Some paintings require a more comprehensive initial sketch than others. For me, anything with animals or people falls into this category. Once I begin layering in pastel pigment, it's pretty hard to make a burro's legs farther apart or his ears laid back at a different angle. So I spend time getting things right, initially. I'm sketching here with Carb-Othello pastel pencils.
Many fine artists project their photos and then "trace" the image for extreme accuracy. There's nothing wrong with this- it isn't cheating!
For me, the hand-eye coordination required to look at something then put it on paper is where the most fun of begin an artist lies. My figures and animals are all done just by looking, then adjusting and correcting. They aren't technically as accurate as those done by projection, but, they are mine, and in that, I derive satisfaction. (If you like projecting or otherwise duplicating your images, go for it!)
The dark hatch marks show my measurements. I used the length of standing burro's head as my baseline meaurement. In the second, corrected sketch, the legs, back, haunches and smaller burro all relate to that length. I also look at negative shapes as I correct a sketch. (The space between the ears, the legs, etc.)
The best artists keep learning. One of my favorite brush-ups is to rent a DVD on an artist or technique I'm interested in. For $10.00, which includes roundtrip postage, Smartflix lets you keep their DVD a week, from the time you receive it . So you can as you view and review it. It's an economical, convenient learning tool.
I started drawing animals when I was a little girl. I've shifted to landscapes, but I still enjoy putting the pencil to an occasional critter. These burros caught my husband's eye. He stopped the truck; I snapped about thirty photos, from which I printed half a dozen as reference for this pastel. Intuitively composing as I went, I combined those six different scenes and five burros into one sketch.
Once I've done a rough composition of form and pattern, I go back and correct it for proportion, line, angle. This is a crucial step in a successful painting. A bad drawing makes a bad painting. Take the time to make it right.
In a classical sense, I've already doomed this 12" x 15" composition-- I spontaneously placed the focal point, the weighty burros facing the edge of the paper and under the background mesa. That makes the viewer's eye leave the page instead of exploring it. Why not correct that?
For one, I like my sketch. I don't want to start over. Besides, I've painted enough that I think it's fun to find ways to break the rules successfully. In this case, I see a circular compostion developing. I will tweak that tendency to the max.
I circle suggestions of dark ultramarine yucca-like foliage around the animals, careful to weight them heavily opposite the burros for balance. I then lay in the sky, blend cerulean with a white-lilac blue. This is a simple sky. I want the viewer to look at the burros, to explore the foreground. For the sky--and only for the sky-- I blend the pigment into the paper with my bare fingers.
Sky done, I use more dark blue to suggest the darkest shadows in the distant mesa. This is where compostion comes to play, but I am careful not to cheat on the terrain features.
Next, I lay clouds across the cerulean sky. I use soft white, again blending with my fingers. A light touch makes for wispy clouds. After blending a layer, I roll another stroke of white across the clouds and let the paper grab whatever pigment it will. I leave this last layering unblended. It adds texture and depth to the simple clouds.
Even tho this is a simple sky, I layered the clouds from front to back and from top to bottom of my canvas to suggest distance. The clouds are positioned as compositional elements...your eye follows the line of clouds to seize the opposing ochre line of grass. This (hopefully) keeps you inside the painting.
Out in Big Bend country, deep ultramarines and rosy caput mortums underly most major terrains. I use these colors to indicate the actual ridges and gullies and peaks of the distant mesa. No fudging. It's a real landscape, remember. But I can artistically emphasize indentions or rolls without sacrificing realism. So I make the draws and the ridges point to the circular pattern I'm creating.
With apologies to my models, this isn't an animal portrait, and I take great liberties with the burros' markings. Using a deep brown, I weight the larger burro's rounded flank and hind leg, suggest a heavy dark mane that circles down toward the resting burro.
Using mid-values (as in lights, darks, middles) now, I stroke cool gray (almost a lilac) into arbitrary areas of the mid-ground to complement the warmer ochre hue. Despite the colorful paintings I produce, I think mostly in terms of value, not of color. If you squint, there's no line between the ocher and the gray in this middle ground. That's because the two hues (colors) are the same value.
The white of the paper and the brown of the burros compose the opposite ends of my value spectrum in this painting, and they jump right out from the calmer middle values, even tho the mid values are more colorful.
The usual colors in Far West Texas are blues, magentas and golds. Green is almost a seasonal abberation. That doesn't mean the landscape lacks color. I lay color in quick, windblown strokes to indicate the movement of various grasses. Even here, I am cognizant of composition. I want the eye to follow the color around the painting.
Adding a deep earthy magenta across the ochre and gray and into white spots makes a dramatic statement disproportional to the time and effort spent laying it in. The value of my red here is darker than the ochre and gray, so I get "pop" from both color and value. I lay in my warm color more solidly around the burro's head and sweep it down and around. Circling.
Opposite that warm magenta, I use cool dark browns, blues, greens and purples to paint the shadows and spears of my dagger plants. Which also circle, just in the opposite direction.
I also decide to make the standing burro's head white, so I use dark greens behind it as negative space to define the head. These darks, opposing the ones on the tail-end of the animal make another circular pattern. (How cool is that?!)
Although these last few additions have made a huge difference to the painting, they took little time compared to the work already done. A strong foundation makes a painting work. You can dabble away at details, but unless you've laid a strong foundation, you're wasting your time. (One woman's opinion.)
ALPINE BURROS 12" x 15" pastel on Wallis paper Lindy C Severns
$1500 SOLD
Okay. I got carried away and forgot to take a picture between the last stage and this finished one. But there wasn't much to photograph that you haven't already seen.
This looks like I did more work since the last stage than I actually did. But I had a solid compostional structure to detail here, and my base colors worked. So It was relatively easy to add the white fur, the green dagger spines, light caput mortum suggestions of bloomed out spires on the dead nettles. Keeping the same color scheme I'd already established, I simply went up and down in value for each of my main colors, adding splashes and strokes on top of what I'd already done. No blending here. Just light strokes of broken color atop layers of the same. Even the cerulean of the sky is bounced into the daggers and especially the shadowed neck of the smaller burro. So your eye blends color as it moves through the composition. Circling.
If you paint, try drawing and composing first-- at least in your head!
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