Saturday, January 16, 2010

DAY 4: NO SWIMMING





I was thinking of subjects that would be good to practice painting on, and my thoughts went to one of my favorite artists of all time, Norman Rockwell. Knowing that I had to make one painting a day, and that painting something of his style would take way way longer than painting a finger, I decided to give it a try. It would be a good way to study how Norman Rockwell painted this boy and what he considered when rendering the piece. I particularly liked how he described the structure of the face through light and shadow. It's true that once you start painting (and not just merely observing) you get to see first hand what the artist did in order to explain certain forms in terms of how much paint he needed to use to bring out the bulge on the forehead, the subtle hint of the scapula at the back, the knee bone, how hard edges must be to show the glistening of wet hair etc. The wrinkles on the clothes were challenging, since your eyes just get lost in all the swirls and zig zags of the texture. At that point, I just told myself, if it looks like cloth, that's good enough for me. This took a total of 5 hours to paint and another 2.5 hours to clean up. Although it took a while, I'm pretty pleased at how it turned out, I was able to put the method to another test drive, making this complex piece, possible to paint in less time than I would prior to this class.

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