Scott Ewen | The Open studio

This is the progress of a recently completed commission I was hired to paint at the end of 2009. My client had provided me with several images he was interested in having painted and allowed me to choose 1 to use. The various compositions ranged from wide open landscapes with a single distant figure to portrait shots. The one I chose caught my eye as I really liked the triangular composition, distinct shadows, and general atmosphere.

Having never met the subject in person was an interesting challenge. I only had a few angled reference shots to work from and later on during the course of the painting I discovered the picture was actually about 10 years old, from an entirely different time in the couples life.

Since I generally use photo as a simple reference or jumping off point as opposed to a hard and fast image to be copied, I was more interested in the general spirit of the image than anything else. Of course it’s important to capture the portrait as closely as possible since it is a commission but ultimately I do want to be able to take quite a bit of artistic license with a photo. In this post  I’d like to show you how I start and move through this process of working with photo reference with a distinct goal in mind, while not becoming a slave to the original image.

To the left is the original reference photo I chose to use. I loved the activity in this one as well a the addition of a prop, the stick, which I wanted to use as a way to move the eye around the image, creating a baseline for the bust which I planned to spend the most time on.

—-

For a project like this I start by simply transferring the basic composition onto the canvas. I decided to work somewhat large here, on a square canvas at 3′ x 3′. This was a bit bigger than the client had originally wanted but after talking to him for a while about we both decided a larger, more central piece for his space would work better. I’m a big fan of going as large as possible and find that people often will reduce things initially. I know lots of people don’t always have the space for pieces this big but if possible, I would always recommend going as big.

Below is a shot of the first sessions work, transferring the image to canvas and modifying the image to work within the new square format as opposed to the vertically oriented one of the photo. Here I’m mostly concerned with composition as well as establishing where my lights and darks will go. I’m also trying to capture the face as best as possible right off the bat. My priority is a solid foundation which the rest of the painting will be built upon. I want to be able to work over this base and have freedom to mess around with it while maintaining a structure I can always reference and return to if needed.

I’m working over a blue gray ground with Prussian Blue for the drawing. I usually start this way with a nice transparent, most often burnt sienna and treat it almost like water colors or ink.

Keeping everything loose I’m looking for central elements and key lines that everything will play off of. Sine it’s a wild outdoor image, I though the sharp line of the jacket would be a great place to anchor the surrounding organic elements on, with the lapel and zipper leading up to the arc of the head and finally the partially obscured face.

—-

Here’s the second session where I start to toss in a little color here and there. Starting to think about going over the blue underpainting and figuring out what colors I want to use for the entire piece. Since I knew this painting would eventually be hanging on a dark blue wall with only natural lighting, I knew I wanted to go really warm with the final result so it would pop off the wall.

This is about the time where I abandon photo reference for good. I may dig it out later on to check the portrait but that’s about it. One you’ve gone far enough down the road the original photo can be more of a hindrance than a help.  As an artist it’s important to inject yourself into an image instead of molding yourself to reproduce one. Painting is all about turning things up to 11 and while photography can often achieve this same goal, in regards to painting it can become deceptive. The camera lens renders shadows differently, usually quite black and featureless, where as painting is a medium that allows you to build up shadows in interesting and beautiful ways, playing in the half tones between your extreme darks and extreme lights.

—-

Now I’m starting to warm it up, adding some greens for the grass, aranges in the trees and glazing the skin tones-generally moving around all over the canvas and building up atmosphere. Starting to think about how I’m gonna tackle the ground covered in Fall leaves which honestly simply ended up being a whole lot of straight up work.

I also still have a lot of white left in areas and in the end, the only white will really be in the shirt which is of the crisp, linen variety. I still need to color the jacket and the jeans and I plan on glazing these up so I can maintain my original shadows.

I’ve gotten to a good point with the ground and leaves and things are really starting to warm up. There’s something wrong still that I can’t put my finger on but all in all it’s moving in the right direction.

After looking at this for a few days, whatever was bothering me was only getting worse. One afternoon I ended up taking a cat nap on the sofa in my studio and woke up looking right at the painting. It occurred to me that the horizon was way too dark and that the entire thing was creating a claustrophobic sense of impending doom closing in one the subject. Not a good thing for this painting, obviously.

I mixed a bunch of nice pinks and soft oranges and just started covering all that black up with marks letting the entire horizon fall into abstraction. The result ended up allowing me to take the painting in a direction I got really excited about. Any painting is usually a series of ups and downs and this was definitely an up!

At this point it was just a question of having some fun and warming it up a bit more to the orange , Fall like side, with less of the yellow from the Pale Ochre I had used earlier. Over the course of 2 more sessions I got the entire piece to a point I was satisfied with and went ahead and signed it.

I had a custom steel frame fabricated by a local metal artist Brian Frisbie and below is the final piece delivered to the client.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 8:50 pm and is filed under In Progress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.