Wait... you were in school all Summer and had a great time?! What? Slow down there a sec... explain yourself immediately!
Happy to. You see, I took an oil painting class over the Summer. Yep, real, legit painting with real, legit oil paints. So, I got grades and assignments, and credits for this class. It'll even go on my transcript. But at the same time, I had an awesome, fun, creative and low-stress time. The perfect vacation from Chemistry and Math, if you ask me.
Unfortunately - I misplaced my camera near the end of the semester (yes, Summer classes still have a semester). So I lost all of those progress photos! In fact, the only paintings that I have progress photos for are the last two ones that I did. :(
I'll show the photos for one of those two paintings here. The second one comes in a future post. Now I shall begin to bombard you with photos and more lengthy explanations.
Glazed Still Life Painting
- Sketch the setup.
- Paint in gray-scale with a thinned out layer of paint. This is the "underpainting"
- When dry, add transparent "glazes" of color. Each object is done in one single color at this point.
- Build up more layers of transparent color, letting each layer dry before adding the next one. At this point, different colors can be added to different areas of each object in order to match it better.
- Add the shadow glazes. These are darker and richer. May be less transparent than the previous layers.
- Add the highlights. These are much more opaque and some may be completely opaque.
In the below gallery, you can see that I forgot to take photos until the under-painting was complete. Oh well.
You can't really tell in the photo, but the painting has a very glossy and luminous finish to it. This is due to the built up layers of transparent colors. It's one of the awesome qualities of the glazing method. :D