Patrick McDonnell's Demos: techniques and tips
2 Oil painting demos; Caballero and the Red head
Caballero Portrait demonstration continued here
1. Sketch
You can draw directly from a model, from memory or imagination, from a photograph or even from a computer monitor. There are ways of transferring images directly onto the canvas or paper using computer graphics printers, and then painting over the image. You can even project a photographic slide image onto your canvas and trace it (Norman Rockwell took photos and then transfered his images onto canvas). Vermeer and Canaletto were alleged to use a Camera Obscura. (Another old method is called squaring up)
I prefer the old way of using the eye and the brain.
Using charcoal sticks I sketch onto the canvas or prepared board. This way I can erase with my hand or a tissue/cloth any lines I dislike, or even start over if I don't like the composition..
• Vine charcoal is probably the best kind to use - it is thin and comes in different hardness - square or round. Charcoal pencils also can be used.
Next I either fix the charcoal lines with a fixative. Or I draw over the lines using a graphite pencil, then wipe off the charcoal. Sometimes I will use diluted oil paint, or acrylic paint to make a more pronounced drawing, with shading and color.
2. Grisaille (from the French - gray tones)
If you want to make a very realistic painting (and add more work to your process) you can take your charcoal drawing one step further and add tones and highlights by working with kneaded erasure, and charcoal stumps. Frankly, it seems a lot of work for nothing as all of your work will be covered by paint. But there are traditionalists who swear by it. They also like to make charcoal drawings that are academic - taken to the a photographic quality.
What I do. sometimes, is to place my dark layer or glaze over my charcoal sketch. This serves three goals.
1. First I can seal the surface of the canvas or board with a coating of my medium, allowing me to paint over it afterward in a more old master way i.e., the paint doesn't soak into the canvas like a watercolor paper.
2. Secondly, I can place my Dark values on the painting, Later when they are dry, I will add a little more dark values, but the under-paint will not run around, and so I don't worry about my light paint strokes picking up darker paint and going muddy. Unless you like to paint that way.
3. Thirdly, I can add an overall tone to a white canvas or gesso board; old masters did this because the medium (like the one I use) would darken their colors, so a darker surface made their colors 'pop' - like working with pastel on a toned paper. This under-painting,, glaze, will also give the final painting a certain glow, depending on what color you use, i.e. yellow ochre, black and white etc..
3. If I am painting 'alla prima' (completing the whole painting in one sitting) I will continue painting, putting in the light values, highlights. Then I go back to the shadows and place the reflected lights, then at the end I put in demi tents, using black and white mixed to make a grey that I place judiciously between the lights and darks. This is called the Pre-umbra,, the twilight of no color.
4. A painting can be finished 'alla prima' in one sitting. Or I can just do a rough work up of the tones - very lightly, not heavy handed. Then I let the paint dry completely and later refine the work, starting from darks to light, adding detail, smoothing transitions, gilding the lilly...
As I paint, I am not slavishly cover up my initial sketch, but refining and changing the painting. I am continually drawing, but now with paint. More examples here:
- Gypsy girl
- Blond girl
- Caballero Portrait demonstration continued
- Portrait Redhead finished
- Japanese and African protraits
More Information
The subject of my New Mexico Caballero was based on a photograph I took while visiting my painting teacher. I traveled to Santa Fe by way of a living museum that was having a horse day. This gentleman was a spry, intelligent fellow who told me he had been in the movie 'Pretty Horses'. I asked him if I could take his picture, and then took another picture of a horse that I combined using photoshop. My son and I watched some great horsemanship by both men and women that day. Hopefully I will do other paintings based on my photos. By the way, in New Mexico, cowboys are not Vaqueros or Charros, They are called caballeros which goes back to Cervantes Spanish. The word for knights, or horsemen..
According to National Geographic:
The Spanish cowboy began "in the Southwest, two decades before the pilgrims landed in 1620 on Plymouth Rock, when adventurous criollos (Spanish-born Americans) and mestizos (mixed Spanish and Indian settlers) pushed past the Rio Grande River to take advantage of land grants in the kingdom of New Mexico, which included most of the western states.
They were called caballeros, says Donald Gilbert Y Chavez, a historian of the cowboy's Spanish origins."
"One of the highest stations you could have in life was to be a caballero," said Chavez, a resident of New Mexico whose lineage can be traced to the Don Juan de Oņate colony, the caballero who was among the first cowboys in the U.S.
"Even the poor Mexican vaqueros were very proud and there were few things they couldn't do from a saddle."
Caballero is literally translated as "gentleman." The root of the word comes from caballo—Spanish for "horse."