People often ask me how I come up with my compositions, so here is an example of how I work.
Putting a composition together is similar to cooking for me. I think about the elements I want in the painting, and start collecting ideas for color, iconographic elements, background or foreground motifs. Here is a collection of documents that I collected for this work, although all of them did not find their way into my painting:
I do a series of virtual compositions on the computer. These are, in a way, my sketchbook. I try out all different sorts of things, and often do many different versions of virtuals for the same painting. Here is the virtual I decided to use:
And here is one of the rejected ones:
When I feel like I have solved enough issues to pick up a paintbrush, I start working in acrylic. I like acrylic for this part of the process because it allows me to make as many changes as I feel necessary, quickly. A couple photos of this part of the project:
Once my composition is decided, I move on to oil. l start by putting veils of white (optical grays) over all of the painting and enhancing form:
Then I start glazing down. The intensity of the color is arrived at through a repetition of this process: glaze, scumble (bring up whites) again and again. This is the time consuming part. As the layers of glaze are applied, they merge and lose a bit of their strength, so at the end of the painting, I do one final glaze which may seem unnecessary or superfluous. But since we know that oil paint becomes more transparent as time passes, an extra glaze is my insurance for the future that the intensity of the color in the painting will remain strong.
I hope this explanation will be of interest to the Steemit audience, and encourage questions, comments, and of course, upvotes and resteems.
My website: www.kathleenscarboro.fr