The Process Behind 'The Insidious Whisper' #3

Let's backtrack and have another look at my initial drawing; you will see that the huge figure has an almost human face with what I was thinking of as a "cracked earth explosion" around his eye. As you do. This linked in with the sheer destructive power of the whisperer.

 

I stuck with this idea for a fair while into the painting process until I started to block in the main elements (see above). Even with a dark area around the eye the head would have been lost due to the strength of the patterns on the arm. I needed something with a lot more presence to balance this. Oh so much easier said that done.

This problem coincided with me picking up a nasty stomach bug so while I was recuperating, lying on the settee watching films, I started to think about and sketch ideas. After further consideration, I decided that at this stage in the series of paintings the creature would still be trying to conceal its true appearance. (In the next painting the disguise is definitely starting to slip.) A mask was needed. I didn't want to include any new materials in the painting so I went with the mask being made from crumbling concrete. 

My first sketches in Photoshop show the mask without the towers but again, it didn't have enough presence.

 
The mask draws heavily on ideas taken from the free association phase of my planning. I've got a pretty good idea what my subconscious was up to but I'll leave you to come up with your own interpretation. That's a lot more fun.

I drew the mask so that the figure was directly facing the viewer, brazenly going about his business. I liked the fact that this put the head in an impossible position. It made it more disturbing for me. Which always makes me chuckle. When I started to add the mask to the painting, I decided to change the angle of the pit to direct the viewer to the smaller figure. I also changed the number of sections on the top of the head to make it more angular and less friendly (I know, the original's not that cuddly is it?)

This design caused some major headaches in the composition. With the mask present, the balance of the painting was pushed to the right. I had to add more to the image on the right, painting an extra inch strip of background, to shift the composition back and I removed some distracting buildings and a tower from the right. (Later on when I added the large foreground tentacle in the lower left hand corner the composition shifted to the left and I had to rebalance it using the smaller tentacle on the right and by strengthening the tentacle in the upper right hand corner. It certainly was a back and forth process.)

 

The scariest part of this painting was adding the final washes to enhance the fog effect. I tested ideas first in Photoshop and on spare pieces of board before tackling it on the main painting. Any mistakes made during this stage could have resulted in a lot of repainting. The way that I worked was to mask off the foreground areas with masking fluid and then wash over the whole painting with very dilute white paint. I then masked off more areas and added the wash again. I repeated this numerous times. The pictures below roughly show this process, the yellow areas showing the areas masked at each stage.

 

I had to repeat this process a couple of times to achieve the result that I was looking for. I was quite happy spending this extra time doing very thin washes because I didn't want to overdo the effect. That would have been very very bad.

I hope this look at the painting process has been informative and I look forward to seeing you next time.

To see a larger version of 'The Insidious Whisper' or to buy signed limited edition prints visit my website: www.daviddentonart.com

As an extra bonus here's a time lapse video of the whole process.

 

If you'd like to see a version of the video with a commentary about the process then click on the Members' Area of my website and become a member (it's free!):  

www.daviddentonart.com

The Process Behind 'The Insidious Whisper' #2

In this post I'm going to talk about colour mixing. Mainly because it was a complete nightmare during the painting of 'The Insidious Whisper'.

Grey. It's one of the trickiest colours to mix. The problem is that greys in the real world aren't neutral greys as you'd see in a black and white film. They lean towards a certain colour. Let's see how that works: to mix grey I start with white and then add red, yellow and blue. The proportions of these colours determines the final grey. If they are balanced perfectly a neutral grey is mixed. But if a little yellow is added the grey will tend towards yellow. Extra red and blue will lean it towards purple. When I talk about adding extra, it's the tiniest amount of paint just using the very tip of a small brush. It's all incredibly subtle, but carefully mixing greys can turn a potentially dour painting into a riot of colour albeit a subtle riot of colour (possibly more a 'minor disagreement over whether milk should be added first or second to a cup of tea' of colour).

 Yellow

 Purple

Green

(These may look slightly different on your screen but you get the idea.)

  All well and good you say, but what made 'The Insidious Whisper' so difficult. Okay. The first problem is mixing the subtle greys. The next is the fog. Fog destroys a lot of the contrast in a scene: the whites aren't pure white and the blacks are dark greys. So rather than having a full range of tones to play with, I was restricted to a narrow band of greys in the middle. 

 Tonal range in 'Welcome

Tonal range in 'The Insidious Whisper'

The final problem is the sheer amount of depth I was trying to put into the painting. Due to the fog, I needed to have paler tones in the background gradually getting darker into the foreground. So when working on the background tentacles I was only had an incredibly narrow tonal range to play with.

Putting all of these issues together meant that I was mixing colours with a 000 brush and modifying them using the tiniest pin pricks of colours. I would then dry the paint to check it against the surrounding colours and modify it again. It was a painstaking process.

As the painting developed I was constantly revising the tones that I'd already done either by repainting or adding very dilute washes (I deliberately kept my colours on the light side so that I could do this).

In the final stages I applied many white washes over certain areas to enhance the fog effects. This was ever so slightly stressful (understatement ahoy) because if something went wrong it meant a lot of repainting would have to be done. I kept looking at the painting in Photoshop and trying out the washes before I did them in real life. This saved me numerous times as I was able to test things first.

To see all of this on a larger scale version of the painting, visit: http://www.daviddentonart.com/#!emotional/c1t44

Next time I'll back track to talk about the mask and the reason for its creation. See you then.

For Part 3, click here.

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The Process Behind 'The Insidious Whisper' #1

'The Insidious Whisper' stems from times when a person's inner monologue goes rogue and becomes his or her worst enemy. But it does it slyly and sneakily, hidden in the mists of the mind so to speak. When this happens, it's not the most useful of things and its main objective is to criticise and generally put down its owner. What makes it so devious is that these thoughts are very hard to spot. But spotting them is the key to turning them around and beating back the foul beast.

My original idea was to have a large hulking creature sat in a wooded area, framed by a circle of branches and other foliage. (The work of Brian Froud - see above - was lurking around somewhere in my subconcious especially in the fairy tale fantasy feel that I was after.) On the creature's shoulder would have been a crafty little character whispering into its ear, a bit like the cartoon devils in various Looney Tunes cartoons, but more disturbing obviously. I went through the usual process of making lists of words through free association (for more on this click here). This radically changed the setting and the respective sizes of the figures. The whisperer became a large powerful beast and the other character a more dejected emaciated figure.

  
Luckily enough, when I was planning this painting there was fog every morning for about a week, so I went out with my camera taking reference photos in Conisbrough (around by the old Earth Centre) and by an old bunker in Rossington, affectionately known as 'The Shack'. I also went to an area of waste ground by the side of the Keepmoat stadium but I never actually used this area in my painting. Maybe another time...

To help sell the idea of the scale of the large figure I wanted to have interaction between him and the environment. I built scale models of the shack and other elements and took photos of myself in various hard to maintain positions. I then played around with this in Photoshop and twisted the figure into an even more improbable position. All of this work helped to solidify the final positions of the characters in my mind.

After this planning I drew out a rough outline of the buildings in perspective and the figures. After scanning this into the computer I played around with the positions of the tentacles - you can really see the Lovecraft influences coming out here - to lead the viewer around the painting, give a greater sense of scale and also use the z-axis in an interesting way.

Once the drawing was finished I printing it out and transferred it on to the illustration board ready for the painting stage. As you can see from this initial sketch I was going with the idea of a cracked earth explosion around the eye on the whisperer. This would change later on in the process, but we'll find out about that next time...

See you then! 

For Part 2, click here.

Or to return to my website, click here.

The Seven Gates

I've just posted my third painting in the Seven Gates series on my website and it's all getting a little bit darker. I thought that now was the perfect time to tell you more about how and why I'm doing this series of paintings.

I've suffered with some form of depression on and off for pretty much all of my adult life. But because I'm not too bad at hiding it, I can function reasonably well. I only realised that I had depression when I heard an interview with Stephen Fry. He talked about how he didn't want to commit suicide but he wouldn't be that bothered if he died. (He would have put it much more eloquently.) At the time this really resonated with me. 

Since then I've had numerous bouts, some severe in nature. It's a shockingly bad illness that has been stigmatised throughout history. (I would probably have been burnt as a witch for being possessed by demons in ye olden days.) If you break your leg everyone has a right laugh, signing and drawing pictures on your pot. Not so with depression. The most common (and unenlightened) ways to deal with it are either with a chirpy "Cheer up, it may never happen" or to simply give the sufferer a wide berth and some shifty sidelong glances to make sure that they don't suddenly become prone to a desire to partake in an axe attack frenzy. Very helpful.

I started this series of painting to come out of the depression closet (finally we get to the paintings). Each image is my way of defeating a certain set of thought processes. For example, 'Welcome' is all about self destructive thoughts. So if ever any of these crafty thoughts pop into my head, I can identify them and link them to that sultry seductress. Recognising the thoughts is the first step in getting rid of them. They try to stay hidden but the paintings have given me a glimpse into their secret world. It certainly helps to know thy enemy.

I have plans for the future to develop more paintings on a similar theme. The Seven Gates  series is based on my own personal experience, but I want to include a wider view of depression in my future works. But that's a way off yet.

This may all give you an image of a depressed artist sitting alone, beating his head against a wall when a colour is slightly wrong and generally looking glum. But no, you're more likely to find me dancing around the room to a bit of Closure in Moscow. I'm actually pretty happy doing what I'm doing. Since I left teaching a few years ago, I haven't had any episodes of depression. That's a very telling statement, let's repeat it and I'll put it in bold just in case you are thinking of becoming a teacher. Since I left teaching a few years ago, I haven't had any episodes of depression. Maybe this is why I feel able to write about it all now. I still get some stray thoughts but I'm finding it easier to identify and get rid of them. This is all the more surprising when I consider that I've gone through a few massively bad life events in the last three years.

So my paintings may be on the dark side, but at the minute I'm a cheerful little fellow who likes nothing more than a great film (Laputa: Castle In The Sky would be quite nice), an engaging board game (Time Stories anyone?) and plenty of cups of gorgeous tea.

See you soon.

(Here's a handy link to The Seven Gates series on my website: click here.) 

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