| 13cm x 23 cm (5 inch by 9
inch) Tempera on canvas The original has several inches of extra canvas beyond the actual picture you see here so it can be mounted the same way that you would mount a watercolour, behind a mat board, and then glass in front. It was painted on un stretched canvas. I find this handy because at these small sizes this kind of work looks far better if it is displayed as if in was a watercolour with mat and glass. Also easy to store in a portfolio plus the advantage of being scanned on a drum or flat bed scanner should you need to reproduce it for publication or further manipulation in a graphics program. |
| See enlargement of original. About
140%. Note the interesting surface. In the original it is easy to see, but at this size seen at 72 dpi you do loose some of it's detail. |
| The picture on right is a scan of my
original tempera painting and had some filters applied to it using a
graphics program. In a very short while of playing about I was able to get a rather nice effect. I did not add anything , just applied a filter. The effect has possibilities for illustrations for a book, quite graphic yet not lacking too much content. I often find that superior results can be developed not by just using one technique but blending two together, traditional work first and then the computer effects. I find this to be the most creative approach and it is quicker then trying to develop the entire thing from scratch in the computer. Using both makes you extremely versatile and the work has that something everyone is looking for, that little something that makes it stand out from the rest. |
| I will describe the process as well as I
can. I am not sure it is possible, many events happen at once many can
only be realised on reflection and a great deal of the work can only be
described as being a good idea at the time. I don't know if it will be
useful, I offer it in the interest of sharing and encouraging others to do
the same. I will also explain the materials, such as Sun thickened Linseed oil and egg tempera. Note to people that are only familiar with computer programmes. Just as computer programmes are very complex and capable of much, so is using traditional media complex but the benefit of learning them are great and the combination of traditional and computer where appropriate will put you way ahead of the rest when it comes to producing a vibrant alive work. |
| OK I have an idea vague as it is and start to draw with no interest in style or in fact anything about any part of it. I draw it in an almost removed state, it starts to come together and it draws my interest but I never let any part get precious. I play with the idea of having a sail boat at the bottom of a cliff, there is a huge cave in the centre of which is a steep rock face going up towards the top of the cave ceiling. At the top stands an old castle in part decay ( all this is in the cave with the boat in the water in front of it.) Confused? You should be because that is not how it looks now. Now I put tracing paper over the drawing and use a brush and Indian ink and draw the design, not so much tracing it but more searching out it's essential elements. You are very concerned here with the balance in black and white, the dynamics, you are thinking as if developing a wood cut or lino print. it should be just as dynamic and balanced under very poor lighting meaning you are not depending on cleaver drawing, surface detail or bits of eye catching but otherwise ineffective detail. The design makes or breaks entirely on it's ability to grasp your attention in a split second and seeing it in the dark devoid of prettiness is a valid test. In truth everything after that is only surface decoration to give your senses something to see on closer inspection. You can do what you like and by pass this if you think you can do it in your head. Or perhaps you want to use this tracing and scan it into the computer and start painting it directly in a graphics programme but I think it is better to push on with the developing of the original painting using traditional techniques. Several reasons.
So rub a charcoal stick on the back of the tracing paper and lay it on the canvas and secure it with tape, use a pencil to trace over the ink lines, don't bother with the outline of the ink marks, the centre will do. You are going to keep the tracing along side your work anyway as a reference as you are now going to trace somewhat accurately with a brush full of sepia brown waterproof ink directly on the canvas, it can be quite dark or you will loose the line too quick. Use your head , if you are outlining an area that you know will be light.. Go lightly, water it down. Now start with tempera, watercolour if you like. It's a funny thing really. Most people make a water colour painting or an acrylic painting or an oil painting. My procedure is this and that is that I have not decided yet. I never need to decide, I stop when I feel it is finished. There is no difference in medium really as it slowly flows one into the other. How? Water and oil? Very easy, it is a sound procedure, nothing new, in many ways almost as old as art itself ( I know someone out there will blurt out the date that they think oil paint was discovered, well around then). All the art you have looked at under my heading of oil paint is actually egg tempera and mostly underpainting, (with the exception of the cockpit painting) it is hard to tell what is under or over painting and I don't really think much about it. So now I start to model the objects in the drawing and I use brown as a suitable middle tone and a darker tone for the darks and white for the highlights or leave the white off leaving the canvas untouched. Computer people will note that there is no undo and this is actually an advantage as it demands more thought and more intense effort (but it does not feel like effort) it just makes all your moves so much more purposeful with a more powerful result, it will not permit you to get bored which is a great thing because with infinite undoes we tend to not give it our best and try a few times and in some cases settle for that will do because quite frankly we are bored with the programme. Yes you can be extremely boarded even when you are flat out trying to beat a dead line. Once all my modelling is in place using very few colours I start the over painting in more colour ,but only where it needs it. There is no real cut off time where the over painting starts. Some of you might be wondering why the under painting if you are going to paint over it. Well you don't paint over all of it. It is far easier to get all your modelling in place using hardly any colour but concentrating on the modelling which is affected by the light source in your picture. Also you develop the surface complexity at this stage. Later you apply colour, but thin so that the underpainting shows and adds to the surface detail. Yes you work in layers, that's just what the old masters did, just like using a graphics programme when you use layers and set different layers to different transparencies so that they add to the whole. You did not think the writers of the graphics programs thought this up for themselves did you? I hope not because it is and always has been the bases of producing original art using traditional techniques. Taking just a moment out to strengthen my point and I am not claiming any credit for intelligence, just sharing (the ones that know this info can skip this paragraph) . The Dodge Tool and the Burn tool are two more examples of not new inventions but hand me downs from actual photography. The dodge tool is where in traditional photography while working in the dark room in front of an enlarger the photographer is projecting the photo image in the form of a negative onto light sensitive paper. Now as it happens, often the image may have extremes on the one negative so no exposure will satisfy them all So the dodge tool blocks light (often nothing more then the photographers hand which he has to keep moving or he will get a hard edge or the Burn tool which again is the photographers hands cupped together allowing a small area of light to get though a small hole he forms with his hands and while constantly moving his hands to prevent a hard edge while counting all the time determines on instinct and professional experience as to when that too dense a black area of the negative has had enough burn in with light to make a good print. You using the graphics program have the advantage of being able to see the result as you work while the photographer has to really on his professional experience because to those unaware of the process the photographer sees nothing as he burns, only on development does he see the result, The photographer has my respect. Ok, so we start to add colour. In a perfect world you would plan your work so you knew exactly which part would be light and which dark, The plan should always be not to dirty the canvas in an area that is to remain light so that it has a glow which can not be replaced by body paint , In practice it rarely turns out this way but try at lest to keep the most important light area clean, (see the steps next page, link at bottom of this page) and you will see that despite the fact that many parts of the painting change, the most important area, that of the view of the boat and the background behind it is mostly the original underpainting retaining that glow. Most of the paintings you saw under my heading of oil paintings with the exception of the Cockpit one are basically egg tempera. If for example when I was painting the painting Distant Thunder and I come to the trees I realised that they were finished as the under painting says it all in that area, I don't rework it , I left it as was and applied heavy paint where the snow is. That is how you paint, Most important is to see and learn above all to leave it alone, read on. All pigments used for art are basically the same ones. By that I mean that the exact same pigment to make a particular blue in say watercolour is also the same one used to make acrylic paint, designers paint also known as gouache or oil paint or egg tempera and in some cases even the same when used as ink (provided they do not use a dye). The only real difference is the vehicle or binding fluid that sticks it to the painted surface. In watercolour the vehicle is obviously water, which evaporates leaving the pigment to fall off so a binder is added, usually gum Arabic, there are other things like honey to improve the flow ( this is not intended to discus how to make it, buy a book) . Acrylic paint is pigment and a acrylic binder that can be thinned with water, oil is the same but uses linseed oil or sun flower oil, a slow drying oil, same pigment. I don't recommend thinning this with turps, I also would never recommend anyone should add linseed oil to it to spread or thin a colour as you will make a mess and the oil will penetrate through the ground and into the canvas making it brittle with time and it rots it, nothing looks more amateur then to see large oil stains on the back of the canvas, a dead give away that your new to it or perhaps never understood the proper practice , you would have a good teacher if they actually told you about this at art school (they are usually too busy being creative and producing stuff that will not last, I speak from personal experience, I hope they have changed.) This is going somewhere but I need to fill a few gaps so it makes sense. The answer to almost all of it is linseed oil but not in the state it is in but sun thickened. Don't ask me were you buy the stuff because I don't think you can. Stand oil is a little like it but then again not as it is boiled. Sun thickened linseed oil is required to make egg tempera (at least the way I make it). The egg tempera I make is made of a whole egg, sun thickened linseed oil, Dammar and water. I will tell you how to make the sun thickened linseed oil in a moment. Why use it? Many reasons. The first being that being an emulsion (both oil and water) means I can use it with water as if it were watercolour, I can use it with oil paint, I can even use it on and in wet oil paint and mix it all together, I have the perfect binder with which I can lay very subtle see through layers of paint, or bold paint . I can mix it freely with gouache paint with the added advantage that on drying which only takes moments any additional layers of paint over the top does not lift the colour below, which is a brilliant advantage because the lifting of the colour below as you apply a new colour using just gouache is one of it's major failings and why a lot of people end up using acrylic paints. Acrylic paint has it's uses but for me just does not stack up as much of a painting medium unless you really plaster it on which I usually don't want to do. It also does not hold an raised edge as well as oil does tending to round off and pull back. It has very little covering power, it is way too see through. Good for a glaze perhaps or water colour. I am not a chemist but my reasoning is that seeing as how they use the same pigment as all the others the fault is with the medium, in this case the acrylic binder . It would seem that the acrylic binder is incapable of holding as much pigment as say oil or egg or gum Arabic can. It is a fact, you can see it for yourself but if you need a mental picture of it. Perhaps if you think of the binder as small glass marbles, then perhaps the glass marbles in the acrylic medium are quite a bite larger so would not hold as much pigment as a finer marble solution might. I am not saying that is the explanation but it seems like a good one. Gouache plus the addition of egg tempera becomes what acrylic is not, a superior painting medium that displays both water resistance and superior cover with just one thin coat, not just the characteristic of that paint as the same happens when you mix your own pure pigment with egg tempera, you can control the cover very well without having to lay it on thick. You can also paint this paint on to or into oil any time you want. You may have read about egg tempera being a difficult technique, that it requires careful cross hatching. You can if you like but you don't have too. This is the problem with too many so called experts in the field claiming bizarre limitations and suggesting it can only be done on panel and usually restricted to small work. I for one would love to know where they get their dribble from. If they are simply describing old works on panel perhaps painted in monasteries, fine but that should not then be re written by hacks as the only way and what is more is that the historian attempted to record how it was done but the hack ( hack here does not refer to the Historian but to writers that are indeed hacks in that they have little idea of what they are talking about and so make gross errors which does not help anyone) has re written it as the only way and he has never tested it. Point is you can use a 4 inch wide brush if you like, you can lay it as a wash if you need, you can do what you like with it. I have never found any restrictions whatsoever and you can use it on paper board or canvas. And for the record I painted a large 4 by 4 foot painting that was almost finished, I didn't like it so started a new canvas. I took the old one out side, hung it up on the washing line and sprayed it as hard as I could with the water hose while at the same time beating the canvas with a broom to see just how permanent it was. Well I certainly caused cracks all over the place, mainly because the ground was a chalk ground that was not meant to be excessively bent and beat with a broom. Well I could not remove any of the paint, I tried to get in the cracks but it stuck like sh.. to a blanket . I have no idea where they got their limited conclusions unless they are perhaps talking about pure egg tempera (using only the yoke of an egg) that is possible as I have never tried that as it never seemed like a very good idea to start with. By this I don't mean to belittle the great works that may have been created by it but for me to just use pure yoke has entirely no appeal and way too restrictive when compared to the formula I use. A very very important observation. Be careful what brush you use, it affects the end work to a high degree. To do this test I used Chinees stick ink, rubbed it down, made quite a lot of black. I found in every case that a natural hair brush, one made from an animal, sable is good, deposits a very much blacker line on the paper then a synthetic brush that is loaded just the same as the sable, by dipping it in the ink and drawing a line with it. You will be amazed to see that the synthetic brush produces quite a noticeable greyer line when it should be black. Theory, I have non but would guess it has something to do with static repulsion or attraction on perhaps the synthetic brush is too fine and closely packed to allow pigment in. I have no idea but I don't use the synthetic for this reason. Not a small point if you need to draw a line once and once only. Please let me know if anyone has found a synthetic brush that gives as black a result as a natural haired paint brush, to date I have not found one. How to make sun thickened linseed oil. Go to the health food store and buy Flax oil (linseed oil). Get a tall glass jar with screw lid, fill it about quarter full of Flax oil, now add tap water so the jar is half full, throw in a hand full of chalk and some clean sand some salt . Screw on the lid and give it a really good shake, shake it in the morning and let it stand and again in the evening, do it for a week. At the end of the week you will find that about one third of your original oil is now a pale white yellow hanging under the oil. The constant shaking and settling has taken the water soluble waste to below the oil . Don't shake it now, siphon off the top layer making sure to not to get any of the light coloured mucus stuff. Your right, the linseed oil you now have is just as dark as it was before, probably more clear though. Now you have to pour it into a large flat dish, the oil being about half inch deep (no more). Put it in the full sun, if possible position it so it has the sun on it most of the day. I do hope you are not in a hurry because in the Australian sun in December (which is our summer) it takes a month. Are you still there? Have I finally lost everyone. If it is winter it needs to be longer. You might be wondering how you can use this stuff commercially, simple, make a batch and when you see you are running out make more. You don't suddenly decide your going to be an artist and paint ether though this seems to be the notion some have and then get discouraged after a short try at it when it requires years to learn and a few years at college is hardly enough if you don't already come with years of practice, a title does not make you what you claim to be (degree or not) you are what your work looks like at the time. Put a glass sheet over it to keep bugs and rain off and make sure that fresh air can freely travel over the linseed oil. The glass also makes it all hotter. What is happening is that the oil is polymerising (Linking, slightly setting) and at the same time the sun is bleaching it to a pale light yellow like light honey and it is thickening. It should really be thicker and not anything like water in it's movement but still flow able. Remove the skin that may have formed . I actually remove any skin that forms as I don't want the process to stop or slow down. Save your sun thickened linseed oil in a jar with screw lid. As long as you keep air away from it it will keep for years and not set. As you use it up replace the missing volume with glass marbles so the level rises so as to reduce the amount of air in the jar. Now a quick recipe for the egg tempera that I use. One whole chicken egg Carefully crack it in half and pour all of egg into jar. Keep the egg shell as you are going to need them, or one half, the best half as a measuring cup. Throw the other half shell away. Now the remaining half egg shell will be referred to as a measuring cup to prevent confusion. Fill measuring cup full of water and pour in with egg, do this 4 times. Screw on lid and shake. Now fill measuring cup full of sun thickened linseed oil and pour in with egg , do this one time. Put on lid and shake up. Now fill measuring cup with Dammar ( which is Dammar dissolved in Good quality turps) to the viscosity of thick water if you can imagine that, or the viscosity of glycerine at room temperature ( Do NOT USE Glycerine ). Pour dammar in with egg , put on lid and shake up. That's it EGG TEMPERA. There are many recipes out there, I like this one. Some say there is a special order by which to add the ingredients so they mix well. I usually do it in the order given here but I have been known to mix up the sequence at times and it still mixes fine. Just shake really hard. How do you use it? Pour out a small quantity onto a container, put the rest in the frig sealed and labelled and make sure everyone in the house knows what it is and were you put it. I am not responsible for poisoning. I am only recommending you keep it cool. It does separate so all you do is shake it up again. I don't keep it longer then a week, it seems best when it is fresh. Just use it as you would water when you make a watercolour. If it were designers colours or you own pigment just work some egg tempera into it on your palette and use water as well, as much as you need, You do not need to grind it into the pigment as you would with the making of oil paint, it is no different to say adding a binder or gel medium to your acrylic paint, you would not grind that ether. You just work the paint into whatever consistency you need not forgetting to include some egg tempera. Particularly if you are working with your own pure pigment or it will not stick. Experiment. The main reason for adding the egg tempera is that it makes it water resistant (not water proof, neither is acrylic water proof by the way) and by using less water and more egg tempera you are working your way towards an oil painting, but a very lean one which is good. If you then decide the painting needs some oil paint, particularly where blending is needed you pull out your oil paints. Note that you should be working on a gesso surface if you intend to use 100% oil paint down the track, If the oil paint needs some very thin line (hair? Cables on a ship or what ever) mix up designers colours or your own pigment or watercolour with egg tempera and use a fine sable brush and paint it into the wet or dry oil paint, it will stick. And you can draw a line almost as thin as a single paint brush hair with it should you require it (try doing that with oil paint because you will find you will not be able to in oil paint alone). But don't expect miracles, it is all up to you and you skill, but the materials are up to it. So you see with egg tempera there is not a hard cut off point where you are painting a water colour, a tempera or an oil. It is whatever it is when you stop and I kind of like that. Word of caution. Don't put egg tempera on your watercolours if you are using semi dry colour in pans as you will find them very hard to dissolve next time as they will have a water resistant layer on top. Clean your brushes with turps then water and soap. I use sable brushes a lot but if you have a favourite one you use for pure water colour, don't use it with egg tempera as it will not be the same again. |
