Orion Nebula

I started this painting nearly a year ago (last October, to be precise), when I was painting several variations of the Orion Nebula.  What inspired me was a false-color image of the Nebula's "tracer bullets"–globs of stellar dust shooting across space–colored in bright orange and blue.  You can read more about the tracer bullet phenomenon in this article by the Faulkes Telescope Project.

The original reference image.

There was some pre-planning to this painting, but not a lot.  I was afraid I would procrastinate on it and end up not doing it out of various fears, so I pushed ahead as fast as I could.  The lack of pre-planning made certain stages later on more difficult.  Even so, I do not regret starting it so quickly.

This was not a complicated painting.  I had the blue-and-orange Nebula, and the astronaut and his spacecraft.  I went back and forth painting layers for the Nebula and the dark blue of deep space, and the spacecraft.  Halfway through the painting, the orange and the blue were mixing together and becoming a muddy green.  I went back, whited the muddy parts out, and repainted them.  The final stages of the painting were lighting up the blue nebula bullets, and adding the off-white highlights on the astronaut and spacecraft.

What I learned from this painting:

• Prime the canvas the main background color.  This prevents the bright white canvas from throwing off how colors appear to your eyes.
• Develop the underpainting as much as you need to.  It is the foundation your painting will stand on.  I did not develop it for this painting, and it made finishing the spacecraft much more difficult.
• Don't leave your wet palette alone for weeks on end.  The paint becomes runny and useless for painting.  The palette gets smelly and moldy, and you have to delay working on the painting in order to clean the paper and sponge.

With these lessons in mind, I can do that much better on the next space painting.

Detail images of the painting below.

Sand Tiger Finished

After a little procrastination, I sat down again and laid the opaque layers over the translucent underpainting.  I blobbed in the background fairly abstractly, but stayed faithful to the reference photo in regards to the shark's skin.  It was a tricky color to mix, there were subtle hints of yellow and pale red towards the shark's tail.  I mixed a blob of white, a dab of blue, and tiny dabs of yellow and red to get the proper color.

I'm liking this translucent-underpainting-opaque-finish method.  It lets me see where my drawing is during the first stages of the painting, and at the same time I can figure out what colors I'll need and to build the painting up.  It takes two or three layers of watered-down acrylic before I'm ready for the opaque, but the total painting time wasn't much more than 6-7 hours for this one.

Sand Tiger WIP

Here's a work in progress of a Sand Tiger shark (or the Grey Nurse, or Ragged-Tooth shark, as it's called in other countries).  Nothing else out there has gums made of teeth like this guy.  The painting is acrylic on 110lb "canvas paper".  It's very similar in texture and weight to real canvas, slicker, suitable for acrylic or gouache.  The underpainting is watered-down and translucent, so I can see what I'm doing, and then the final layers are thick and opaque.

Sharks in Acrylic

The fruits of my labor so far, in my efforts to re-learn acrylic.  These were done off photo reference.  At the moment I don't care about composition so much as mixing/matching colors properly, finding the shapes in the darks and lights, and feeling out how acrylic works.

I like the glazes I can get with acrylics; getting them evenly is what I have trouble with.  That, and estimating properly how much paint I'll need for any given area.  The individual brush strokes matter very much, the marks they leave are immediate and obvious, somewhat unlike watercolor (where the start and end of the stroke is obvious, but the water and pigment evens out in the middle of the stroke on its own).  It's not a bad thing that the brushstrokes show up; they can be incorporated into the painting.  I did just that with the shadow on the light belly of the great white, to emphasize its sleekness.  The great white's forehead was pretty well chewed up by other sharks, it was a mishmash of blue-gray shapes.  I mimicked that by blobbing colors of similar values on, so as to achieve the mottled effect.

Long story short, I am, in fact, enjoying this exploration into acrylics.  Stay tuned for more.

Sketches 7/5/15: Model Acrylics

Back to the life drawing studio, this time attempting to learn the ways of acrylics.  A big thank-you to Chelsea for modeling.

Gonna Do It

I'm gonna do it.  I'm gonna get back into acrylic, even though I have no idea what I'm doing, as this acrylic sketch so clearly evinces.  It's based off this photo, taken at a nearby park:

With practice, lots of practice, all the study, all the tutorials, I will one day be able to paint streams of light like that.  I'm gonna make it happen.

Orb Weaver Spider Complete

The orb weaver painting is done!  You can see the "before" picture here.

Big Spider Alert...

It's been a year or two since I painted in acrylic...too long.  Way too long.  I forgot how fast you can go with them.

That orb weaver spider right there is a little larger than a quarter.  She's living in the tomato plants right now, growing fat and happy off the juices of flies and bees.

Morning Stretch

Gabriel Warila © 2012