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 'Welcome' #3

After the planning stage I started on the painting in a conventional manner with the sky then the background. I repainted the sky a couple of times to get a look that I was happy with, using some very careful blending. The background was much easier. I used a similar technique to painting water, always working horizontally across the image, but swapping the colours to create a foreboding unsettling landscape.

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The translucent cape was the hardest part of this painting. After finding many images of translucent floaty material, I drew one particularly appropriate piece to get a feel for the fabric.

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After that, again working in pencil, I worked out what I wanted the cape to look like, mainly sinuous, sinister and floaty. I drew it in four separate pieces to be overlaid when it came to the painting stage.

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Tracing these drawings was the next stage to add them to the painting. (I'm not adverse to tracing when I've actually drawn the original.) I only transferred the outline on to the painting, as I kept the drawing as a reference for the shading later.

Rather than blather on about how I painted them in writing, I'll blather on about them in video form:

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As I was painting the material I would go back and forwards between the painting and a Photoshop version where I could try out placements for new pieces of fabric. This was particularly of use when it came to the pieces snaking around her arms which were not in my original plan.

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The rest of the painting was fairly straightforward. Easily the most fun part was the hair. Starting with a dark basecoat I applied fine hair detail in white.

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It was then just a matter of using thin washes to develop the colours and tones to exactly where I wanted them. (The 'just' part of that last sentence was a full day of 'just'.) It was a really satisfying process and one that I have used significantly on my next painting. But not for hair. (See below for a sneak preview.)

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See you next time.

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The Process Behind 'Welcome' #2

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After the whole free association business that I rambled on about last time, I actually start to put pencil to paper and start sketching some initial ideas. This could be in the form of thumbnail sketches to help me get a feel for the composition or sketches of important components.

In the case of 'Welcome', I used both techniques to arrive at the idea for the mask. I spent a lot of time looking at and researching Venetian masks and the meanings behind the different types of masks. The type I chose was a Volto mask. Vivo Masks states that historically these masks "guaranteed complete and utter anonymity as no part of the face shows". This was perfect for what I wanted. I tried out some small sketches to get a feel for the general look of the mask and when I was happy I had a go at a larger sketch. I settled on a final design relatively quickly, although changes were made in the finished painting.

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I used Photoshop extensively in the planning stage of this painting. I had taken some photos of the bleak landsape I required at Hatfield Moors, near Doncaster. Interestingly the place that I chose is the site where a plane crashed in World War II. It was on its way back to Finningley. One person survived the crash only to die on the moor not far from the plane. There are still some small fragments of the plane there now on the small hill shown in the painting (although the actual hill isn't rocky in the slightest). I tweaked the landscape to make it darker and added a new broodier sky. Then it became a collage job to put together the character from a variety of sources.

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In the planning stages, I love the flexibility that Photoshop gives me. I can try out ideas quickly and I can always go back to previous versions if I'm not happy. One problem that I noticed though was that I spent a little too long (read that as far too long) fiddling about and making a half decent job of the final image on screen that I would then use as my reference for painting from. On the painting that I'm busy with at the moment, I rectified this and only developed a very rough version that was enough to solidify the composition.

The reasons why I don't use Photoshop for my finished paintings are that due to the personal nature of my paintings I wanted to work in a more personal media, one where my hand mixes the paint and applies it to the board, and I also feel that paintings created in Photoshop have a similar feel to them. Don't get me wrong, I like that feel for certain subject matter, I just didn't feel that it was right for this series of paintings. Maybe I'll work solely in Photoshop at some point. We'll see...

For Part 3, click here.

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The Process Behind 'Welcome' #1

After releasing my latest painting into the wild I thought it was probably best to tell you a little bit about the process I go through in creating my images. I start with an idea; it could be a feeling, a problem, a desire, anything really that lurks around in the dark secluded areas of my mind. At this stage I already have an idea about how I’m going to represent it visually but I’m very open to change.

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I write down the central idea at the top of a piece of paper and then use free association (the mental process by which one word or image may spontaneously suggest another without any necessary logical connection) to derive a list of words. I try not to think about why I’ve chosen these words, I put them down and consider the implications later.

Then I look at this first list and see which word(s) jump out at me. Again, I don’t think why, I just go with it. I choose one of these words, start a new list and then repeat the free association. Making lists for each of the words that jumped out is time consuming but it generates a lot of ideas.

Finally I repeat this whole process a third time, seeing which words jump out and making new lists. I do it three times because I think that this stops me from skittering about on the surface and forces me to delve deeper. Many times I will reach one of the third level lists, a word will spring from my mind and I’ll think ah, that’s what this is all about.

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Using all of the lists, I look for suitable words to mould the direction of the painting. This can sometimes cause radical changes. On my painting ‘Welcome’ the background stayed fairly similar to my original idea but the character changed dramatically. My initial plan was to make her a wizened old witch with leathery skin and deranged eyes. I don’t know which would have been more fun painting, but finding reference material for the current version was certainly interesting.

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I got the idea for using free association from the screenwriting book ‘Story’ by Robert McKee. It advises looking at your script, seeing which words jump out at you, and then free associating. Doing this process with a script was a revelation that certainly delved deeper into the characters' motivations and personalities. So I pinched the idea for my painting.

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There I was, feeling a tiny bit smug, thinking that I’d found a new method of creating images, and oh... it turns out the surrealists got there quite a few years before me. Ah well, here’s hoping that the process will deliver some original images instead.

For Part 2 click here.

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