Painting Moon Snails in a Limited Palette

On the sixth day, God created the artist, realizing no doubt that He had far from exhausted
the uses of color.
                                                                                                     ~ Robert Brault

Moon Snails with Coral - 5" x 7" oil on canvas

I've mentioned a few times over the years that I really enjoy working with limited palettes. Certainly I am often tempted to augment my colors when I see all the gorgeous paint choices at the art supply store, but I've managed to keep my palette hovering around 6 colors plus white for a while now. Generally I use a warm and a cool red, a warm and a cool yellow, and a warm and a cool blue to mix all the rest of my colors from. I've found that this method gives me nice color harmony in my work, with the added advantage of not having to dig through piles of tubes of paint trying to find a specialty color. I suppose I could also say I'm lazy in that with fewer colors, I don't have to remember as many combinations of which colors play nicely when mixed together and which tend to make mud.

Blocking in the shapes and values.

In this painting I only used 3 colors plus white to mix all my other colors from: alizarin crimson, winsor yellow, and ultramarine blue. This is certainly not a painting with a lot of flashy color; it's much more low chroma, but I like the subtlety. I plan on painting this set-up a few times, playing with different combinations of primaries to see how they affect the mood of the scene.

Detail from painting

Moon snails (a carnivorous gastropod with a craving for clams) are found around the world, but the particular species in my painting live along the Atlantic coast. These two shells are from wintertime visits to the New Jersey coast with dear friends of ours. We love beachcombing in winter. The heat and the throngs of people are gone, leaving us a wild and beautiful expanse of sand to explore.

More Shell Paintings

"To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow..."
                                                                                                              ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Conch shell - oil 5" x 7"

Shells with ink bottle - oil 7" x 5"

My first post and first paintings for 2015. The shells are all from my father-in-law's collection, and the lovely antique ink bottle was a gift from a dear college friend. I just love that color blue.

Happy belated New Year, everyone!

50 Ways to Paint A Nautilus

"She said to me 

The answer is easy if you 

Take it logically

I'd like to help you in your struggle 

To be free

There must be fifty ways..."

  ~ Paul Simon

An early attempt at a still life with nautilus.

Beautifully rendered paintings don't happen overnight. So many beginners (and some more advanced artists) give up on art because of the overwhelming frustration of not being able to produce what they see in their heads. It is incredibly discouraging when it doesn't go right, when you start to question why in the world you are torturing yourself like this. Good art takes practice, perseverance, and many many mistakes. Typically we don't get to see the mistakes of other artists though, only the final perfect piece which looks dishearteningly effortless. I think this adds to the unrealistic expectations we have of ourselves. So I'm going to share a whole series of abandoned and what I would consider sub-par paintings that I've done while attempting to render a particular subject to my liking.

You may remember my slight obsession with the seashells that my father-in-law gave me this summer, particularly a beautiful chambered nautilus. It sits in a place of honor in my studio and often calls me to draw and paint it. It turns out a nautilus is a challenging shape to render. It's not a circle, yet the brain - or at least my brain - keeps jumping to conclusions and I find myself constantly having to reevaluate the shape as I paint. This leads to overworking the painting and making the edges of the shell too hard; then the shell either ends up looking flat or like a cut-out.

Attempting the stripes on the shell

And then there are those darn stripes! The painting above had potential, but I got intimidated by the stripes and quit. The stripes have to follow the shape of the shell, not only in direction, but in value and color saturation to match the shell's curvature and shadow. If the shadow part of the stripe doesn't match the shadow part of the shell, it won't make sense to the eye. Eeek! I was so nervous about messing up the stripes that my hand was shaking as I tried to paint them.

Another attempt at a still life with nautilus.

Here's another try at the stripes. Before I added the stripes the nautilus shell itself had pretty good form, but I didn't get the values right on the stripes as they curve and go into shadow.  Too many attempts to fix the problem muddied the colors and created too many sharp edges and the shell ended up looking fairly flat.

I got some very helpful critiques from other artists and what they said made sense; I just couldn't seem to put their advice into practice. At that point, I just wanted to abandon painting the nautilus. I painted many other subjects in-between, but that nautilus mocked me every time I went into my studio. It would catch my eye as I painted other things. It fascinated me and called to me. I wanted to paint it so badly! Maybe I needed to take a deep breath and approach this in a different way; be logical about it, since I was so emotional about it. There's a reason all those Master painters did study after study of things, before they even started on a full-blown painting. And so I broke down and painted the nautilus again.

Nautilus study I

And again...

Nautilus study II

And again...

 

Nautilus study III

This last study, in which I took a deep breath and added the stripes, is the closest I've come to what I want, so far. I even managed to get that sense of mother-of-pearl on the interior of the shell. I now have hope that I can successfully include a nautilus in a painting after all. There are definitely things I can still do to improve it, but that thrill of accomplishment, the sense of victory after so many defeats, is a bit intoxicating and probably is what drives us to do this crazy thing called art in the first place.

Adventures in Intaglio Printmaking

"I don't like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say art has given me my life."
                                                                                                                  ~ Frank Stella

Finished print on drying rack

One of the classes I'm taking this summer is a printmaking class. Printmaking has always fascinated me, but I've only had the chance to dabble in linoleum block printing and that was a few years ago, so I jumped at the opportunity to explore printmaking more.

Currently we are making intaglio (pronounced in-tahl-yo) prints, an Italian word for etchings or engravings which in its essence means "to cut into". In a nutshell, an image is cut into a copper or zinc plate, ink is applied and then cleaned off, leaving a residue in the cut areas. When damp paper is placed on top of the plate and forced into these cut areas by the pressure of the printing press, the ink transfers onto the paper and creates a print of the image. If a plate is cut into by hand, the process is known as engraving. If the plate is cut into by acid, the process is known as etching. In my class, we're using acid! 

Here's the etching printmaking process, step-by-step. You may recognize the image I'm etching from a shell drawing in a previous post.

Ready to begin the etching process!

A jig is made to keep the plate from moving when I transfer the drawing onto it.

Rolling on the acid resist.

 The whole plate is covered in asphaltum; an acid-resistant substance made from tar.

A printmaking sandwich.

The asphaltum-covered plate is returned to the jig, a piece of plain newsprint is placed over the plate and the drawing is traced on top of that.

The first reveal.

The pressure of tracing the drawing transfers the asphaltum onto the newsprint, which gives you a rough idea of what the final print may look like. Wherever there is asphaltum on the plate, the acid can't reach the zinc and that part of the print will remain blank. Where the asphaltum is removed, the acid will eat away at the plate, creating an area where ink will collect. You have to be careful when handling the plate because it's very easy to accidentally touch the asphaltum and end up with a fingerprint etched into your plate!

The acid bath is in an enclosed booth with ventilation and glass shields.

I donned safety goggles, long thick protective gloves, and a big protective apron before heading to the acid bath. My plate luxuriated in the acid bath for about 6 or 7 minutes. Once the plate comes out of the acid bath, it is important to wash off any acid residue so you don't accidentally get any on yourself.

The post-bath plate

It doesn't look like anything has happened to the plate at this stage...

The squeaky-clean plate

...but when the asphaltum is cleaned off, you can see where the acid ate into the exposed parts of the plate, leaving an etched image.

Inked and ready

 Ink is applied all over the plate and then wiped off, only leaving ink in the etched lines.

The amount of pressure this press can generate is mind-boggling

The plate is placed image-side up on a printing press, damp paper is placed over the plate, and big thick felt and wool "blankets" are placed on top to protect both the plate and the roller when the whole thing is run through the press.

The big reveal!

The final step is the "reveal" - the moment you get to see what all that work produced! There's a buzz of excitement in my class every time someone pulls their print off the plate because you really don't know exactly what it's going to look like. My first print was a little too stark, so when I inked the plate the second time, I didn't clean it off quite so thoroughly and got a nice faint tone in the background. If I wanted to, I could also reapply asphaltum to the plate and add more details, run it through the acid bath and try printing it again.

I'm really enjoying intaglio printmaking, but obviously this is not something I'd do in my home studio. Somehow I don't think our landlord would be too keen on the whole acid bath thing.

Paintings and Drawings

"Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice reduces the imperfection."
                                                                                      ~ Toba Beta

Chambered nautilus study in colored pencil

My father-in-law's shell collection continues to inspire me. My enthusiasm has caught on and now he is searching the house for long-forgotten boxes of shells to give me. He found one box the other day that included a magnificent chambered nautilus shell.

The nautilus is a cephalopod like an octopus or a squid, however its tentacles do not have suckers. It is also the only cephalopod with a protective outer shell. It has changed very little over the millions of years that it has existed, so it is considered a "living fossil".

My nautilus shell model, I fear, was store-bought. To stem the decline in nautilus populations, some countries have banned the commercial trade of nautilus shells, but others have not. I will try my best to make lots of beautiful art with this shell, as I would never buy one myself.

Plate of Shells - 6 x 6 acrylic on canvas panel

Here's a little painting I did of an assortment of shells. The plate wasn't perfectly flat in the middle, so the shells sometimes rattled and shifted positions when I would walk around near the little table I had them perched on. The painting was really finished 2 hours before I put down the paintbrush, but I kept fussing with it and of course ended up overworking it. Oh well.

After 5 weeks of class, my first figure painting in oil is done.

I finished my figure painting in class at PAFA. We'll start another painting with a new model this week. I'm excited to try a new painting, but this week also marks the half-way point of our summer adventures. Nooooooooo! How can it be halfway over already!? I haven't even gotten my fill of East Coast pizza yet - and believe me, I've been trying!

Seashells

"I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
                                                                                                                       ~ Sir Isaac Newton

Just a few specimens from my father-in-law's collection

My father-in-law was an avid scuba diver and underwater photographer for over 30 years and traveled to many different locations to dive. When he wasn't diving, he would walk the beaches looking for interesting shells. Over the years he built up quite an impressive seashell collection. I'm finding his collection quite inspirational.

I've been doing a little research about other artists who were inspired by shells. Probably the most well-known painter of shells was Georgia O'Keefe who created a number of beautiful shell paintings along with her more famous flower paintings. Not so well-known, the Dutch artist Adriaen Coorte painted intimate still lifes featuring seashells back in the late 1600's. I find these still lifes intriguing in their simplicity and beauty, unlike Balthasar van der Ast, another Dutch painter from around the same era whose still lifes are overflowing with not only shells, but also flowers, fruit, and insects. Sometime during the early 1900's British artist Glyn Warren Philpot who was best known as a portrait artist, used a limited palette to paint a lovely still life of shells, perhaps as a break from painting faces. I'm certainly finding shells a pleasant subject to draw and paint.

Study of Babylonia species in graphite.

Detail from shell painting. Acrylic on canvas board.