The Making of Santorini

It's been entirely too long since my last post.  I'd like to dedicate this one to my cousin Kevin who said I should get back on the horse with my blog posts.  I've been blessed recently with several commissions.  This commission below took about 8 months of off & on work. 

It's a traditional oil of the island of Santorini in Greece.  I don't typically get into the realistic oils anymore unless requested, so it was fun to break up the routine.  I stretched my own canvas to fit a particular size that the client wanted. I usually cut my own stretcher bars, but this time I bought them pre-fab.  The reason is that the pre-fab have a routed inner edge to prevent the bars from showing the inner edge through the canvas.  This becomes important when using thinner paints because the texture isn't thick enough to hide the edge.  Anyway, then I stretched & gesso primed the canvas.

  The picture above was taken after one of the more complicated stages.  The process starts with sketching out the composition- not an easy task to scale everything proportionally.  After the sketch is complete the background painting begins.  Side note: many oil painters do a study (practice painting) first Caravaggio, one of my favorite artists, skipped the study phase and started directly on the piece.  The tricky part about the background painting is that you cover the foreground sketching up.  In this painting that meant the windmill blades disappeared..  Once the background dried the blades had to be re-drawn.  Mediums can be mixed with oil to do different things.  There are thinners, drying accelerants, and texture additives.  The thinners are good for backgrounds, but accelerants make it hard to fade mistakes out since it dries so quickly.  Backgrounds need this subtle fade, & soft edge.  In other words, use the thinner & just wait a while for it to dry. Unless you're Bob Ross & do your foreground free hand on the fly.

 In the pic above you'll see my setup.  I usually get comfy on the couch, turn on the tv and hope to not spill paint. It's an endurance race with large oil, so art stools get hard on the tail bone.

One of the hardest parts of this painting was the gradients of white. I first painted the larger blocks of white and thin used very thin layers of gray which I blended in. It's always easier to work from dark to light with oils.  If you mess up with a highlight, you can always throw the darker background color back over it & start over.  The difficulty on this piece was that I had to work backwards.  The gray shadows had to be on top of the white surface. Screwing up wasn't an option; it would mean a week of dry time & a very thick layer of white to cover the darker gray.

 After the blocks of color comes the fun detailed stage. If you're right handed always work from top left to bottom right.  A smear of the foreground can completely ruin a good background.

I'm very happy with the final piece, and more importantly the client loves it as well! It truly has a happy home where it fits perfectly.

I'm now working on another commission which has an abstract/impressionistic background with a realistic foreground.  I't will be a fun mix & juxtaposition of the two techniques.  There are also several other paintings I've done recently that I need to do a post on.  Stay tuned, & I greatly appreciate your support!