Here’s what she looked like before today’s work.
Much better now. See how the forest drops back in the picture below this one, allowing the figure to become the focus of the painting?
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Amelia’s previous incarnation
Posted in Alchemical work, Amelia Earhart, Making work
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Good times in the studio
I had a busy, busy day today. I picked up Amelia from the High Studio a few days ago, where she had been waiting for me for a month or so and finally got to do some work to her. Looking at her in person reminded me how much I wanted to drop back the blues of the trees, which were so bright that they popped out of the painting. So I mixed up some Ivory black and glazed the entire background, then wiped the glaze away, using a sideways motion on the tree trunks to add some bark-like textures, resulting in a far more balanced painting.
I’m almost done with this now, but I can’t help wondering if there’s some detail work I could add to it to hide some little secrets in the painting, perhaps in the low left corner where there’s not much going on at the moment.
Perhaps a frog watching what’s happening, or some insects?
The photo seems pretty overexposed, probably a problem with the phone I shot it with. I guess I’d better get back to using my camera to shoot with, but the phone is so convenient. The colours are often out of whack with the phone too.
I retouched the globe with some Ceramic White because the black glaze dirtied it. This dropped back the orange a bit, which I’m actually pretty happy with. I think the painting is far more dramatically centered on Amelia now, which is at it should be.
I wonder what happened to Caitlyn Carradine, the model for the painting. She went to Germany to do some choreography, but I’m not sure if she came back to the US or not. I was hoping to work with her and Derek on a dance project in Death Valley, maybe it can be revived one day. I think it would be worth doing. We had talked about a dance piece with alchemy, made for video.
In addition to redoing Amelia’s background I added a second hand to the bones, making him really handsome. I love this painting! He’s looking increasingly impressive, especially when he’s lit with a spotlight. He practically jumps off the canvas when he’s got a glowing light radiating over him.
It was great to paint today, I loved it in the studio, even if I’m still feeling a bit crummy from this cold – it’s the best place for me. There’s nothing like painting with a hot cup of tea ready to drink and good rock and roll playing in the background.
I really will have to do something about the quality of the pictures I’m posting. These are really poor. Look for better images next post.
Handy
I’ve added the first layer of the left hand, and repainted the whites in the left arm. He’s again looking more like the rock star death that he was earlier in the process, and will get increasingly strong when his other hand is also in place. It’s tough to get a decent picture of the whole painting right now because the platform is right in front of the piece, but you can get some sense of the progress that I’ve made on it.
The hands will need to be drawn with the Van Dyke brown, then I’ll have to add a little bit of the purple, iron oxide and blue that I used in the sky to find some uniformity. This first layer of white simple provides the structure up which to base the painting. Â (The bare bones, I suppose…)
Posted in Angel, Making work, Tarot-related paintings
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Flu
Goodness, I feel awful. My head is full of cotton wool.
I’ve glazed both of the wings with the oxide now, so neither are as overly blue as they were, and I re-rendered the skull and began working on correcting the bones again. Now that the sky and wings are well established I’m revisiting the bones to correct the details which have been lost as a result of the work that has been going on around them. The neck bones have bothered me for a while, so it felt good to correct them, but I have not taken a close look inside the mouth of the skull to see what should be going on behind those teeth. It was a real pleasure working on this, because there’s a rainbow of paint in the skeleton now, with colours that overlapped when I was working on glazing the sky and the landscape mixing together to vibrate subtly on the surface. Blues, reds, purples and yellows are all present over the warm browns and whites.
I used Ceramic white and Van Dyke Brown with a touch of Iron Oxide to clean up the whites.
An oxide sky
I picked up the six tubes of Iron Oxide that I asked Steve to order for me and finished sealing the Traveling man canvas, which is now completely covered (to varying degrees of thickness) by that lovely glow of rusty orange. I chose to use this as the first layer of the painting to give it a generally warm feel to it, in contrast to the black gesso I put down for the Angel of Death, which will inevitably feel a little starker than the Traveler.
I treated the right side wing to a glaze of the same Oxide, warming it up and countering the blue and making the wing feel more convincingly real, not as monochromatically blue as it was. Some of it rubbed into the sky and floor, adding some pleasant warmth to the painting. The skeleton got a touch of the oxide as spillover and will need another bit of cleanup work. I enjoy these kinds of effect on the paintings though, because they give the illusion of varied warm and cool areas to the image, which is observable in reality – there really isn’t any surface that’s truly one colour – surfaces always reflect the light of the things around them in a rich and complex inter-relationship. In paintings we can create the illusion of the play of warm and cool by allowing the glazes to subtly infiltrate different areas of the image.
The painting has turned a corner, feeling more like a completed work every day, instead of feeling as though it’s an upward struggle toward completion. Now things feel like they’re getting crossed off the list as the work moves increasingly towards the finished painting.
Hands.
A multitude of skulls.
Legs.
Votes for a scythe?
Posted in Angel, Making work, Tarot-related paintings, The Traveler
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Subtlety
I added a couple of subtle layers to the painting yesterday afternoon that don’t photograph well at all, but were very worthwhile; first some detail and definition in the internal structures of the wings – painted in dense Prussian blue (using this lovely blue at its darkest end, where it’s almost black) this additional layer of feathers hides amongst the work on the existing surface and gives a velvety variation to the colour and a subtle vibration to the painting. It’s dark on dark, so it’s pretty discrete, but because the light hits the paint slightly differently there’s activity in the surface that brings it to life.
Secondly, the sky has been treated to a very delicate layer of thin Carbazole Violet that has tinted the blues and whites and brought some drama to the upper half. A little more work here to put the highlights back where they belong at the bottom of the clouds and the sky will be almost complete, meaning that I will be able to re-establish the hands fairly soon.
At the university it’s finals week, so my students have been presenting their work in  critiques. I’m very satisfied with them this semester; they’ve produced some particularly well-made work. My last class meets this morning, after which I will be examining portfolios, then turning in grades before getting ready for a winter solstice celebration dinner this weekend. Solstice begins on the eighteenth, lasting for seven days as the sun holds its position on the landscape at sunrise. Christmas is the day the sun begins to move toward the North again – celebrated in the past as Sol Invictus, the victorious sun that conquers darkness and returns us to Spring and renewed growth.
Posted in Angel, Life, Making work, Tarot-related paintings
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Atmospheric perspective
A layer of Van Dyke Brown mixed with some Ivory black dropped the blue down a bit, then a glaze of Ceramic White above the horizon in the sky and below it into the distant landscape gave some depth to the Raw Sienna field behind the skeleton. I’m doing this because when you look at the horizon and compare it to the environment around you, you’ll notice that things that are further away are lighter in colour, fuzzier in detail and that there is less contrast between things. Artists can use this to create depth in their paintings.
I’m pretty happy with this, although I’d like to have had more time in the studio today. Sometimes you can’t get enough done. It’s pleasant in the studio right now, with the rushing sound of warm air coming through the vents and the rain beating on the roof, while the wind blows the tree beside the windows, occasionally tapping against the glass.
Time for bed.
Posted in Angel, Making work, Tarot-related paintings
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Productive
This was a particularly productive day in the studio, getting the sky much further along by adding a blended blue / grey to the higher parts of the clouds, then a rough scraping of white controlled with a soft rag. All the orange Iron Oxide is still there, but more subtle and effective.
I’ve used a Van Dyke Brown mixed with black to re-establish the details in the left wing and will continue with the right side next time I’m in the studio. At the same time I used the dark pigment to work the upper edge and left side of the wing with some linear suggestions of fine feathers. There’s too much blue in the wings at present, this will become increasingly controlled as I add more layers and detail to the feathers.
I couldn’t stand looking at the blue landscape, so I gave it a layer of Raw Sienna to turn it into something vaguely resembling a desert landscape. Wiped with rags to let some of the blue come through, making a varied surface for the next steps.
Now that the sky and wings are becoming more established it became clear that the bones of the skeleton needed to be cleaned up, so I used that same very dark brown to re-capture the shadows behind the ribs, then repainted the bones themselves with some of that nice transparent Ceramic White. I did some reading on whites this morning to find that Zinc White is not doing well in laboratory tests, becoming brittle and cracking after very short periods of time. Lead White is still the white of choice, despite its toxicity. The Ceramic is good but not as dense as old fashioned Flake White, which I’m going to continue using for my base coats, then switch to the Ceramic for the highlights. Titanium yellows a little, and doesn’t do well as a transparent white, and I hate it as a base.
Detail photos of the chest and head, the edge of the wing and a tiny piece of the sky near the horizon on the right side of the painting.
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And
Here’s the big picture of the painting as it is right now, with loads of Prussian blue over everything except the Iron Oxide sky and the skulls.
I’m quite sure that a lot of this will change, but this was a major step forward, and adds substantial body to the skeleton, which really jumps forward again now, with the exception of the head, which will need to be touched with some Ceramic White to bring it back to the foreground.
The blue background resembles water, but I don’t think it will remain watery for very long.
Posted in Angel, Making work, Tarot-related paintings
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The stuff I love when I’m painting
This is it, right here. I love how I can wipe away the blue from the edges of the figure, leaving just a trace of paint that makes the edge softer and appear to fall away from the foreground. It makes me ridiculously happy considering that it’s really such a small thing. 
Here I’ve posted two pictures, one before wiping the bones clean, with the Prussian blue going over the bone, then one of the pelvis after it’s been cleaned up. That little blue edge to the bones just sings for me.
I’ll do highlights next, having glazed the landscape with left over blue that will help to unify the painting regardless of what colour it ends up being.
Posted in Angel, Making work, Tarot-related paintings
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