PageBlog : the madness begins...

Thursday, June 29, 2006

Posted by Frank Page, 6/29/06 at 7:57:31 AM. i decided yesterday to start my madness a little early. i'm excited about what i may produce in the next year--- be it "good of "bad"...it's art after all.

#1
not really too much to tell about this one. it's me. i've never studied painting techniques really--- other than the quick primer from art history one and two. as with everything else in my life, i'm just going to make it all up as i go along. mistakes are a great learning tool.

i started this piece with a grey/blue underpainting to get my darks and lights together. it was pretty nice just as an underpainting and i toyed with the idea of bypassing color all together. honestly, i thought adding any color would ruin it. but, in keeping with the "make it up as i go along" mantra, i cautiously proceeded with color. i made the decision to keep the initial layers of color almost transparent---if i got to a point where i felt the color was overpowering it was easier to fix lighter mistakes than darker mistakes.

the color layers are in fact so transparent that you can still make out some of the drawn in pencil lines through the paint. some may find this a bit amateurish and they would be right. i, however, think it's pretty cool to see the skeleton under the skin--- the building blocks of the piece in their raw form. looking back there are a bunch of things i would do differently...but overworking a piece is just as bad as underworking it.

off and on (maybe 30-90 minutes a day), #1 took me four days to complete.

#2
this was a fast one. i knocked this one out in one sitting--- maybe 2 hours of straight work. the idea of a pencil seemed pretty natural for my #2 painting. get it? i guess even if you put a brush and canvas in front of me i'm still a cartoonist at my core. i wasn't really afraid of color on this one. pretty simple and straightfoward.

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