Blog

After three sittings I've got enough information in the hands and face to proceed with the painting.  Below is an image of the drawing as I tried to find the right position for his bow hand.   

There are actually three attempts; the higher position, which is easy to see, and two lower positions.  The only thing that remains of one of the hands in the lower position is an indication of the index finger and a line that describes the angle of the bow.  One reason for not using that position was that my dad had to play a note with very different fingering for his left hand, so I would have to either change the neck hand or have it appear that he was running the bow across a string he wasn't fingering.  That kind of incongruity would bother me.

The reason I wanted to try the hand in a lower position was that, in the higher position, all the composition lines were carrying my eye down the body of the cello and right out the bottom of the picture.  Doing that is basically showing the viewer the exits and suggesting they move on, which they will happily do. With the hand lower and the bow cutting across the cello the path of the eye is held there and directed back to the outline of the cello and that line carries the eye back to the center of interest.  It's not a perfect composition but the bow crossing the cello addressed a big problem. 

The next step will be an smaller oil painting to establish my color scheme and then I'll start on the final painting.  

My dad fully recovered from whatever bug had been ailing him (his appetite at Panera  attested to that) and so we were finally able to get to a second sitting in yesterday. 

For the second sitting I spent time refining the head and face.  When I moved on to the hands it really  became apparent that I had positioned the figure too far to the left to fully extend the hand holding the bow.  I realized that I had done this because during our first sitting I let him play along with the music and ignored the bow hand, figuring I would focus on that later.  So I really only placed the head and cello shapes as part of the design for this drawing.  I loved the shape pattern I saw and the diagonal division of the canvas with dark occupying the upper right shape and light dominating the lower left shapes so that really was my concept. 

But that flow is disrupted if I put an area of interest (the hand holding the bow) away from that diagonal flow and off to the left, making a design that is already a little heavy to the left even more unbalanced.   So, at least for this composition, the hand holding the bow will have to be placed within the cello shape. By the time I worked that issue out two hours were up so that hand has been wiped away and covered by a tone (see main image). 

Another problem with my simple dark and light design is that the light is roughly equal to the dark in area.  Symmetry is generally uninteresting and that qualifies as a kind of symmetry, just like dividing the picture into two equal areas horizontally or vertically.  By adding gradation from the lower left to the middle, mirroring the angle of the main diagonal, I shift the balance in favor of dark and draw the eye toward my main diagonal movement. A gradation from the lower right back toward the center of interest keeps the line of the cello from leading the eye into that lower corner too far and directs the eye back to the center of interest. 

I will have to decide if the bow hand will work placed farther to the right, within the cello shape, or whether I have to move the composition to the right and create a different visual flow that includes the bow hand extended to the left.  I should be able to make that decision without the presence of the sitter and then the next sitting can be for sketches of the bow hand, finger-board hand and cello instead of the painted oil color sketch I had planned. 

My dad was under the weather Friday so he had to cancel his portrait sitting.  Instead of updating progress on the portrait I'm posting a little about the panel preparation. 

My goal is to complete the portrait old-school--no photographic reference, working from drawings and color sketches done from life.  I have taken a photograph, and will take a few more, to make sure I have something to complete it with if it turns out I require so many sittings it qualifies as torture.   So the panel will be pretty traditional too, with the exception of having no gesso layer and using an alkyd oil primer instead of lead white.  The materials are pictured below:

Based on the drawing so far I'm going to use a 22"x28" format.  For the panel I'm using 1/4" Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF).  Birch or Maple plywood would be better but I had a few sheets of MDF already.  Because MDF absorbs a lot of moisture I gave it two coats of shellac.  I ripped 1^1/4" strips of  ^3/4" plywood to cradle the MDF.   Also pictured is  medium weight linen, some large palette knives, a bag of rabbit skin glue and a double boiler for preparing the glue, can of oil primer, plenty of clamps, glue, air compressor and a brad nailer.

I cut the plywood strips for the long sides 28 inches and the short sides I cut to fit between them, 20 ^1/2".  I flipped the panel over on it's front side, glued and clamped the strips along the long edges (the east and west edges).  Then I applied glue to the bottom and ends of the short cradles, clamped them along the remaining edges (north and south edges), then attached them to the long cradles through the corners with brads. 

In 24 hours it will be ready for the linen to be glued onto it, which I'll describe in another post.   I hope you feel better dad.

I'm starting a painting I've been wanting to do for a long time and I'd thought I'd document a little of the process and the progress and share that progress here.  After my grandfather died his cello passed on to my father, who played the piano and the stand-up double bass but  never played the cello to my knowledge.  Several years ago he had some work done on the cello, made sure it was in good playing condition and even took some lessons.  Every time I saw him play it I'd think about what a good painting it would make.  

First step is the drawing so recently I had him over to sit for me while I did some quick thumbnail sketches to begin getting ideas about lighting and pose. 

Below is my dad playing his cello in my studio:

I have two soft-box lights with 5500 k fluorescent bulbs suspended from the ceiling of my studio and a very crude system of adjusting them and moving them.  I spent about a half an hour doing thumbnails and moving the lights.  Below are the thumbnails:

You can see I tried light coming from the left and coming from the right.  In the right-most thumbnail, the light is coming from the left and to the side and this is the one I decided to try.  Normally I like to stick with light moving left to right if I can, but the cello seemed to be getting lost in the left thumbnail.  In the image on the right I liked the way main edge runs from my dad's head, down his shoulder and then is picked up by the cello until it gets softer and lost toward the bottom.  It suggested the unity of musician and instrument that I was looking for.  These thumbnails took about five minutes each and I did them in my sketchbook with a General's Carbon Sketch pencil. 

After settling on that idea we took a break.  When my dad resumed the pose, we listened to some classic jazz hits.  He played along with the music and when his hands went where I wanted them I asked him what note he was playing and that's the one I had him go back to when I wanted to indicate hand positions or arm position.  Even the cello itself moved a little depending on the notes being played.

I think we worked another two hours and the result is the main image of this post.  If he's up for it, we'll do another to finish the drawing and then I hope to limit his duty to one more sitting for the painting.  

Stay tuned.