Painting: Valve

No, I haven’t given up on painting yet. Here is the latest painting, it’s another still life and it’s a big brass valve.  This was a tricky exercise as the Valve had some tricky angles and curves, not all of which I got right but I had fun, learned a bit, and that’s what counts.

I took a couple pictures as I worked through this painting over the course of a few sessions. I started with a canvas toned with some Burt Umber to give it a warm base. Next I sketched out the shape with paint, again some Burnt Umber. Then I got to business laying down darks first an then blocking in major values.

I was pretty happy with the results of my first session. The painting was feeling somewhat accurate and loose, I’m really trying to loosen up my painting style. However I felt my colours were too cool so I swapped out the lemon yellow from my palate and used Cadmium Yellow instead. I ended up painting at least one whole new layer over the first session.  The paint went on a lot smoother this time which was nice.

I  paid a lot of attention to warm and cool values during my second session. I had a small window to the left that was letting some nice cool blue light that hit in the shadows. I also had a warm brown surface that the valve was sitting on so I wanted that warmer value to be reflected in the relevant shadows.

Here is the end product.

I learned a lot on this painting exercise, it’s certainly not perfect but I’m happy to let that go and move onto a new painting, which I started today. Carrots, yeah I know, not exciting but I want to paint something orange. 

Posted in Art
Tagged as oil painting, painting
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Scott Annan
Mar 25th, 2009
at 3:01 pm

Dude – that’s really good!