This painting was taken from a photo I had taken that inspired me. I am including it in my Urban painting series and want to use this painting to explore the massing together of similar shapes and tones in a composition. It is amazing how few shapes and tones we need to really depict a painting. Unifying shapes gives a stronger simpler appeal to the painting by allowing more tones to run into each other unifying the whole painting. It is then much quicker for the eye to read and understand.
Moonlit Night, 12 x 16 inches, oil on canvas
To accomplish this I used the aid of the computer and my knowledge of PhotoShop. Using PhotoShop for about 15 years and teaching it at the University of Cincinnati for over 9 years gives me a lot of experience with the program. I took the image and made it grayscale. Then I adjusted the tones under the levels to provide the tonal range I was looking for in the painting. Then under posterize I wanted to simplify the image to about 4 overall tones. To get an image that still resembled the model I set posterize between 16 and 18. Adjusting it a little more or less you could see the forms it accentuated. I did not want to generalize to loose form but to enhance it.
I then went back to the color image and adjusted it to match the tones in the gray scale image but I did not posterize it.
I then printed out a black and white on my laser printer and the other in color on my color printer.
I began developing a tonal image in blue grays and slightly warmer grays to give variety to the under painting. The gray posterized image gave me a good start in separating and generalizing tone. I was trying to keep it to about 4 tones. Working and reworking I was able to get my tones to just these 4 now having moved from the image to only the painting. The image did not dictate the tones it eventually came down to me to make all final decisions. Using my knowledge of anatomy and conceived forms (See conceived forms video) I was able to represent forms that had volume and felt natural.
(Continued on my next blog post)
Workshop: How to use the Digital Image in paining, See workshop page of website
