TET Art: Three Wise Color Monkeys

TET Art: Three Wise Color Monkeys - Part 2

Camera Inception!

Last post I announced the start of a new painting titled, Three Wise Color Monkeys. Turns out I was serious about getting back into creating some traditional art because I managed to get over the first hurdle... making a start.

For most artists, making a start means setting up the canvas, paints, and actually painting the first brush strokes. For me it's working out how I'm going to set up my camera so I can film the whole process with the least disruption to actually doing the art.

You'd think I'd know where to set up a camera by now considering I have filmed myself painting more than 30 artworks on my YouTube Channel.

The problem was, if I set my camera up in the usual way, it would constantly be in the way of a major thoroughfare through my studio.

With a bit of thought I managed to find this amazing elevated camera angle just over my right shoulder (see the photo above), achieved by standing my tripod on top of a bookshelf. Not only is the camera nicely out of the way but also, the view is wide enough that I can talk to camera if need be without bending too much to make sure my head is in shot.

You might think setting up a camera is not much of a barrier to making a start, and you'd be right. However I'm not actually a big fan of filming myself painting so setting up a camera is more of a chore than it really should be. Plus I can't really not set up a camera when I'm trying to revive my YouTube channel.

Watch the video diary below for a little more info about my camera set up then watch me paint stage 1 of the actual artwork.

Stage 1 - Transferring the Drawing

Transferring the Sketch to Canvas.

Almost every painting I've done since 1995 starts the same way, drawing the sketch onto the canvas using red acrylic paint. There's no light pencil sketch first - though I seem to recall I used to do this but at some point I decided it was a waste of time.

The way I paint is very loose in the beginning, gradually progressing to finer, more considered detail toward the end. As a result any initial drawing tends to get lost under my paint so I just stopped doing them.

For those InkTober purists who think drawing digitally is easy because you don't have to commit to your lines, try drawing in red acrylic paint on canvas, and then talk to me about 'commitment to lines'.

As you can see from the photo above my transfer sketch is very loose, possibly even unintelligible in places to anyone but me. You'll also notice I've filled in areas with red because red paint also serves as a mid-tone for my initial under painting that I do using the three primary colors (red, yellow, and blue - did I really need to spell that out?).

If you're really observant, and able to decipher my scribble, you may notice the middle monkey's legs have changed position. I wasn't happy with the way they were positioned in the sketch so I thought I'd try something else (how's that for commitment - InkTober purists?).

The next stage will be to complete my under painting, then to start blocking in the major areas of color. I'm anticipating this to be a some what easier painting to complete given the majority of the final color is very close to primary and secondary colors (the colors you get from mixing two primary colors together - helped spelling that out, right?).

Hopefully I'll get most of that done by next week.

If you'd like to follow this artwork's progress but blog posts and video diaries aren't for you, I'm also posting work in progress photos to my Instagram. So be sure to stop by there and follow me for the latest images.

Comments

Software Stylus for Tablet Drawing

I own an Android Tablet that has available to it many great drawing applications. The trouble is, drawing on a touchscreen with your finger is like trying to sketch with jumbo crayons. As is trying to draw with most stylus pens which are only a marginal improvement over using your finger. Precision drawing on your average touchscreen seems like wishful thinking. However I've had this idea for a software stylus that acts like an extension of your finger and allows drawing with greater precision. See my rough diagram below. Essentially it's a pointer that follows your finger around the screen. Its angle can be adjusted so that from your vantage point it looks like the tip of your finger is coming to a point. Softnib concept sketch. You simply move the pointer around and the line is drawn from the point of the stylus instead of somewhere under your finger, where you can't see it. Obviously I haven't worked out a...

Occupy Wall Street - Movement for Change of... Something?

I've been kind of following the Occupy Wall Street 'movement' from my position of apathetic denial of what's actually happening in the real world - that you can see if you pull back the curtain or disconnect from the Matrix. In particular I've watched vlogs of the Melbourne, Australia, Occupy Movement through the eyes and camera of You-tuber Sean Beadlam . Sean is quite a hard hitting comedian whose humor is topical, political and often based on the injustices faced by the oppressed. He also focuses on the media and how they'll beat up a story to get their 'angle' rather than provide balanced reporting of the whole story. Although not one of his comedy routines this video below from Occupy Melbourne is a good example of Sean's work with several juxtaposes of the Occupy movement with media and Sean's use of technology. Although Sean isn't the only source of my information, you would think that a guy like him would have...

Who Even Reads This?

W riting this blog is largely both a labor of love and a discipline. Since about 2006 (the blog started in 2004) I have written a minimum of two posts per month. Sometimes I've posted more, particularly in the last 4-5 years, where I've tried to write and post at least one article a week without fail. Unfortunately it's not a niche blog, unless the niche is things that interest me. Which means my blog is either too broad to have regular readers or too niche to have anyone other than my mum reading it. Which she does (hi Mum) as we established back in January of 2014 in the post Ya Mum Reads it... That said, this blog overall regularly gets 6-7k views every month, mostly through people finding various articles through search engines. By far the largest traffic source is 'Other' which is basically unknown sources. I'm willing to bet a large percentage of that is the dead internet. Bots testing my comments to see if they're spamable or Illuminati spammers. Whil...

Pt5. Three Cat Tails Painting by TET

Finished: Three Cat Tails Acrylic on Canvas panels. Day five of my video diary (embeded below) following the creation of my latest series of paintings, Three Cat Tails. View Part one , Part two , Part 3 and Part 4 if you haven't seen them yet. In the final episode of this series I get to paint the black and white layers that I thought I'd be painting on day 4 but delayed in exchange for adding more purple and green shadow. The black and white layers take the artworks through to completion. Then I finish each panel off with a dark blue border around the edge (to cover up the paint marks on the sides). Whilst I do continue to talk about what I'm doing as I paint this episode does contain a few quite moments of just me painting away because there isn't really a lot to say about the white and black layer. However I hope you'll stick with it to the end just the same. The series of artworks are available to buy so if you're interested contact m...

Pt3. Three Cat Tails Painting by TET

WIP: Three Cat Tails Darker shading and cream fur added. Day three of my video diary (embeded below) following the creation of my latest series of paintings, Three Cat Tails. View Part one and Part two if you haven't seen them yet. In this video I mix a dark brown colour to add some shadow and stripes to my cats. You'll see how the brown tones the orange down quite a bit to make the colouring of the cats a little more believable. I also mix a light cream colour to fill in the transitions between the orange and white area of the cats fur. You'll see in a later episode more clearly what I mean once I add the white back in. Note how, when I add the cream, it initially goes on too thick and I have to wipe it back with a cloth and water it down to make it more translucent. The perils of mixing colours with white paint! Finally I finish up by adding in a few small details like paw pads and noses. It doesn't actually seem like I did that much today. O...

Pt4. Three Cat Tails Painting by TET

WIP: Three Cat Tails Darker purple and green shading added. Day four of my video diary (embeded below) following the creation of my latest series of paintings, Three Cat Tails. View Part one , Part two and Part 3 if you haven't seen them yet. Yesterday I said that I would begin on adding my black and white final layers today. However after looking at the paintings a few times over night I decided the cats could really use more shadow to give them just a little more three dimensional form. I had a strong feeling that adding purple and green shadows was what the images really needed. Especially the two larger images needed the purple shading on the background behind the cats to connect them with it - since those two particular images actually make more sense if you get the feeling that you're looking at the cats, laying on a blue floor, from above. At this point I pretty certain I'm ready for my final black and white detail layers - which I'll get onto...

Pt2. Three Cat Tails Painting by TET

WIP: Three Cat Tails background and base colours. Day two and part two of my video diary (embeded below) following the creation of my latest series of paintings, Three Cat Tails. View Part one if you haven't seen it yet. After painting my initial base painting using the three primary colours, in this episode I demonstrate blocking in my backgrounds and the base colour for the three cats. This episode is a little longer than the last but hopefully is still interesting to watch. All the painting you see is in real time but obviously edited down quite a lot to show the 'highlights' and I explain what I'm doing as I go. I realize these videos aren't as exciting to watch as the more common 'speed painting' style videos but if your the kind of person that likes to watch over the shoulder of a real live artist at work then these might just be up your alley. Continue to Part 3 .

TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

Search This Blog