With this post, you will be able to see a day by day process for my wolf acrylic painting. Recently, I had to manage my time better since I do not always have the time to work on my art. What I decided to do is set aside 2 to 4 hours each day to work on my own drawing or painting. Each image represents 2 to 4 hours of work for that day. What I’ve noticed is that with a designated time slot, I am more focused and I seem to get more done.
For this wolf painting, I actually had to do a black, white
and grey comp first since I was not going with a dark foreground against a
light background as I did with previous work.
I knew that the highest contrast would be on the wolf itself with dark
areas of fur next to light areas of fur.
I also knew that the background would consist of dark grey and light
grey values but no bright whites. The
lightest areas would be reserved for the wolf only. This particular comp is not the prettiest but
it gets the job done. It is always
better to spend a couple of minutes on a comp instead of getting frustrated on
the actual painting because you are unsure of overall values or color
choices. I prefer using brush pens when
creating these comps since it makes the overall values more clear.
This was the first day of painting and I always start with paynes
grey when working on the darkest areas first.
You should notice that I did not do a wash over the wolf since I needed
to preserve light areas for the brightest parts of his fur.
Days 1 through 5 are pretty much all with paynes grey. I like to focus on having a well rendered
underpainting before putting down any color.
Again, paint is never as dark as you think it is especially when working
on a white surface. You might end up
going over the same areas of your underpainting several times before it is
truly dark enough.
This is when I started throwing down color. I first put down some dioxazine purple
because I did not want the oranges to become too saturated. I find that painting on top of paynes grey
and purple tones makes sure that whatever color you are adding does not become too
garish. Painting on top of paynes grey
alone never seems to do the trick. There
is something about dioxazine purple that makes it a great neutralizer. The colors that I added on top were vat
orange followed by a little bit of primary yellow.
In this photo you can see that I deepened the values in the
fur and I started adding some color to his eyes. At this point I was unsure which eye was
going to be a little more saturated so at this point, they were pretty
equal. I started painting the background
elements using a mixture of primary yellow, primary cyan and primary
magenta. The mixture had a little more
cyan in it to move towards a desaturated green.
I used this mixture to make sure I stayed in a grey zone as far as value
was concerned. I knew the mixture I made
would not be able to get as dark as paynes grey or dioxazine purple.
In the eighth and ninth image, the background was starting to get more fleshed out although the overall painting was still not where it needed to be as far as overall values were concerned. Once I had covered most of the surface in paint, it was possible to see that what I initially believed was dark, was actually more of a medium grey.
So far in these images I had only used transparent pigments. In the final scan you can see all of the
opaques I did which center around the wolf’s eye. I used pure vat orange and primary yellow on
the eye near the right side of the picture plane. I decided to make that eye the subject and I
dulled down the other eye with a little bit of dioxazine purple. I did some opaques on the background
particularly on the mountains and wheat field.
The wheat closest to the wolf I did more opaques on to bring them
forward. The stars in the background I
did by splattering an opaque mixture of titanium white and primary cyan with a
toothbrush. After I did most of the
opaques on the background, I then intensified the color by doing some
washes. I did a turquoise wash over the
stars, a cyan wash over the mountains and a magenta wash over the wheat. I did a couple more washes of dioxazine
purple and primary yellow over the wheat to bring the color to the right level
of saturation. I also deepened the some
of the values in the wheat and trees using dioxazine purple. On some of the wheat closest to the wolf, I
used some paynes grey to give them a little more contrast and sharpness.
