This week I completed the bigger project I’ve been working on for a few weeks – ‘Love’s Sacrifice’.
This painting meant quite a lot to me. I think that might be why it took me so long to complete.
I know that most people nowadays don’t follow the same faith as me and that makes it difficult to talk about these things because, although it is the truth most central to my life, I have no wish to push it onto folk who don’t want it. I feel quite strongly that faith is only real when it is freely chosen and not forced.
For me the Christian faith is simply about walking in the way of love everyday as far as I am able. My experience of love is that when you really love another person you put them before yourself, you want what is best for them and you are willing to give of yourself for their well-being. That’s what this picture means to me. It’s about the cost of love and the power of love, when given, to make others whole.
Apologies to those who are not religious or who follow another religion, I’m not so good at talking about these things. I hope I haven’t offended anyone.
I’m still working on my bigger project, ‘Love’s Sacrifice’ although I’ve been struggling with my health in the last two weeks as well so I’ve only done about 2 hours of painting in that time. I’ve completed the background, laid in some basic hair and begun to add the final colour to the body on the right hand side. I’ve not allowed myself to extend a project beyond a week or two before and I am finding it’s lovely to take things at a more relaxed pace. Anyway, this isn’t a finished picture, but here’s where it’s at at the moment…
My plans now are
to complete the body colour, adding a small soft reflected highlight on the right and the main direct highlighting on the left,
to finish the hair properly and then
to add the crown of thorns and the marks from him being scourged by the soldiers.
So the bigger project I’ve been working on in the background these last couple of weeks is a picture which came out of the words of a song we sung at Church this Easter. The phrase which really stuck with me was ‘love’s sacrifice’. I just couldn’t get the feeling of those words out of my head and eventually they became a picture.
Here’s my sketch. It actually took a few tries to get there with this image because the body position was quite difficult to pull off – particualrly his left hand which is mostly hidden by his right knee…
I drew on A3 cold-pressed watercolour paper and was planning to paint with Winsor and Newton watercolour paints.
However, I couldn’t quite picture the colours or style I wanted. So I photographed the sketch and then made a quick colour study in the computer.
At first it was like this…
But I didn’t feel that the background colour was really working, it seemed too flat to me, so I tried a few different colours…
Eventually I settled on this colour plan for my painting…
So I began painting the figure with some lighter skin tones…
Then I gradually deepened my colour and added more shape to the shadows…
There’s still quite a lot of work to do here. I need to fill in my basic background next and then finish the loin cloth which is going to go much darker under his right leg. After that I have this idea of switching from watercolour to black ink to put in a layer of much finer detail to the portrait.
Health Problems
I was hoping to have this finished by now but I’ve had some problems with my medication for the neuropathic pain condition I have – my body is not responding well to it at the moment. So I’ve been taking less and consequently I’ve been in a lot of pain for a while now. It was OK here on my blog for a couple of weeks because I tend to post things a long way ahead of time but now I’m right up to date and still too sore to paint.
Plans and Ink Flamingos
Anyway, I’ve got less I need to do next week after work so maybe things will get a bit better. If I get a chance to, I will finish this painting, but if I have less time I might have a go at a style of art I’ve been talking to another artist on WordPress about.
Last week Nicola, from Ink Flanmingos did a really interesting and beautiful piece based on Merton College in Oxford…here’s a linked picture…
You start with a drawing and then do a really loose colourful wash over the top before tightening it up with more layers later. It looks amazing and I was thinking, when looking at it, how hard that would be for me, because splashing a loose wash on seems, well, mega scary. I love precision and tight lines when I’m painting and they’re almost like a security blanket for me, but I actually really enjoy looking at the results of much freer work which other artists like Nicola can do.
When I first tried to paint I was in digs at University. Fortunately I was staying with a potter who was, herself, very creative and allowed me to paint in my room there. (In fact my bedroom was over the kiln which kept me lovely and warm on those cold Cambridge nights.)
I actually started painting with oils. I knew nothing about any kind of painting at all except what my mother had taught me. She had studied art as a young woman and, before I left for University, she gave her oil paints and brushes to me. She showed me how to clean them and then let me get on with it.
That’s one of the brilliant things about my mum. She has this gift for letting those she is teaching have a go at things and work things out for themselves freely. She pushed us to think for ourselves. Professionally she was a superb teacher (now retired). She gave me this sense that I could do anything if I put my mind to it and worked hard at it.
So I didn’t think anything of using my Saturday afternoons at University to try to paint a picture of the Crucifiction with oils the first time I ever really tried them.
The picture itself wasn’t massively successful – I should have concentrated more on my anatomy as I’m sure I gave poor Jesus too many ribs! Anyhow, this is the only photo I have now of that picture…
Along with a close up of some of the detail…
I do remember really enjoying painting with oils and them being incredibly smelly to have in my bedroom!
Today I saw a brilliant video on YouTube on how to use oils. The artist was using a medium called Liquin (made by Winsor and Newton I think) which dries quite fast but still gives hours of wet time for blending and moving the paint around.
Here’s the video. It’s by Lachri…
When I started art again as an adult I painted in Acrylics, which was fun but very fast drying.
Even using copious amounts of retarder to extend the wet time of the paint, I still found it dried too quickly for me. I was forever racing the drying time.
What I really love about using paint as a medium generally is the ability to blend the tone and colour to get exactly what I want. With copic markers and pencils, colour and tone choices are necessarily limited. The Acrylics were technically able to get there but I never found there was enough time to play with it. Watching Lachri blending in her video (above) makes it look like blending is more relaxed in oils, maybe because the paint stays wet for much longer. I think it would be brilliant to try oils again and find out what it’s like as I can’t remember the details of using them in my youth.
Also, I really loved the way she painted a tonal picture at the start and then glazed over with colour – what an amazing way to do it! I totally love that!
So I’m thinking about getting a small set of oils and having a go. I’m going to have to research which materials to use, especially with respect to drying times and odour. But it might be fun!
Then a week or so ago I sketched a picture of a shepherd with a lamb on his shoulders which kind of said what I wanted to say.
So I re-sketched this out onto proper cold-pressed watercolour paper…
Then I had a go at painting it with Winsor and Newton Artists Watercolours..
At first it looked really wishywashy and pale and I felt all fed up and annoyed with myself for doing a bad job – again. But then the next day I decided that I had nothing to lose if I painted more layers over the top. So I did – lots and lots of layers. Here’s the final painting…
It’s not perfect at all but it does touch my heart in the way I wanted it to. It just has, for me, that feeling of being loved and cared for which I get from my faith.
Because of the autism I have a lot of difficulty accurately communicating what I really feel with words which I find very frustrating especially when people start getting upset with me and I’ve done the very best I can do. My language skills are pretty good generally but I don’t have the usual social context in which most people seem to operate – I’m always misunderstanding the effects which my language has and not getting the whole social aspect of communication. For me, saying “A, B and C”, just means, “A, B and C”. There is no social context, no what they call ‘side’ no ‘reading between the lines’ (which means understanding that there is a subtext in some communication) because I am basically blind to all of this. I can’t ‘see’ social context or non-straight-forward communication. But with pictures I feel that I have a genuine way I could potentially communicate well and accurately in a way which isn’t constantly misunderstood. I have a fighting chance.
I feel really pleased about this picture because it does, for me, finally say what I want to say. 🙂
I’ve had this idea growing in me for a while now to paint something which relates to my faith. I know that many people don’t share this, some have different religions and others don’t believe in any religion at all. However my faith, Christianity, means a lot to me. So I want to paint something which carries something of that love in it.
I began over the last week by doing some sketches…
…I started off looking at more abstract ideas (below), but although I could have fun with the painting side of this – I love painting simple shapes in vibrant colours – I wanted this work to have some love in it and I can’t see how the abstract shapes can hold that.
So I started trying to paint people which I find much more difficult to get right and be OK with.
This (above) was supposed to be a sketch of a servant finding the water had turned into wine from one of the miracle stories in the Gospels, but it still doesn’t work for me becuase Jesus isn’t there.
(Oddly, another difficulty I have with this project is that I’m not comfortable painting the face of Jesus. I don’t know why, but it feels kind of wrong to me to do that. So I began to look for physical positions Jesus could be in which might hide his face.)
I thought of the time when Jesus wrote in the dust when poeople were trying to stone a woman to death for adultery. This felt better, but writing in the sand doesn’t show love, although there was a lot of love in the actual situation.
Then finally I got to this kind of scene:
It still needs some work to get the body positions quite right and a feeling of weight and naturalness in the limbs but I think this is the scene I’m going to paint. Inadvertantly I also got an idea for the background of this painting. This sketch was one of many on the same piece of paper. I used photoshop to , rather inexpertly, block out the other sketches which left kind of low contrast shaded rectangles in the background. I like it and I’m going to use that idea in the actual painting.
So my next job is going to be to sketch this out more carefully and play around with it until I feel that the drawing is how I really want it. Then I’m going to do a painting sketch in gouache.
After that, I want to buy a canvas and paint it big in acrylic or oil (probably acrylics with strong retardents so I can take my time with the blending without the expense of lots of oil paint.)
jo fox - adventures in art 