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Welcome to the Drawing Board #21!

Happy Sunday All! I hope you've had a great week. In between packing up the sold flat-file sale artworks, cleaning the studio, teaching the high school kids, and working my courses for the upcoming semester, I've been tackling thoughts about the art-making process and some fun strategies that I don't think get a lot of love very often. So this newsletter is about recalibration in the middle-game of an artwork using a recent painting that's on my easel!

Also: free Zoom hangout session tonight- more on that below!

Recalibration: Graphic Refocusing/Annotation/"Over-Painting"

What do you do when you get "lost in the sauce" and find yourself stranded in the middle-game of an artwork?

I wrapped up my Pre-College Observational Acrylic Painting course with the high school students on Friday, and as I reflect on my class notes, I saw we found ourselves asking this question a lot while we navigated our coursework. Every artist knows we start more artworks than we finish. In fact, a lot of the time we resort to restarts instead of choosing to wade through the murky waters of an unclear path. We learn a great deal about our subject, our interests, and what's working process-wise while we build an artwork- it's not surprising that we want to take that earned insight and bring it to a fresh start when things get rough. Who wouldn't want a do-over?

But do we need to start over to capitalize on that impulse? Over the past two Tuesday evenings for my Virtual Studio Hangouts I've worked on this acrylic painting of a plaster cast in my collection: Aimé-Jules Dalou's Head of a Sleeping Baby (Tete d’enfant endormi). This is where I ended up after my first pass:

How did we get here? Mostly from stacking tonal note shapes over and over (one of my favorite ways of working with acrylic paint) until something arrived. I talk about this in my teaching as "graphic adumbration".

Once I worked out the basic shapes, their proportion and general character, and worked on locating their placements, I found myself in the "middle-game". I liked what I had, because it was "truthful" in the sense that it was pulled from my observation of the cast, and nothing was straight up incorrect- but it was murky, blunt, and a great representation of an "ugly duckling".

I had reached what John Berger called "the point of crisis", where I cared more about my artwork than the "truth" of the subject itself- there was going to be a divergence between the two, and that could either go well, or not. This happens in every artwork at some point. It has to; the art needs to be its own thing at the end of the day, so it's inevitable.

Rather than start over, I employed a super helpful habit from Nicolás Uribe that he has called "Over Painting". Nicolás has spoken a great deal about this bit of strategy and how he thinks of it within the context of his process, and his use of the term "over painting" is an interesting one: he's using "over" in reference to the term "under painting". So he's literally saying you go over the previous layer with a clarifying structure that'll function to help work back into/on top of the painting later. I think of it as a sort of annotation that helps me to graphically refocus and bring all of that earned knowledge we talked about before back into the work (instead of starting over on a new piece!)

Since I'm keeping this in grayscale (just using Ivory Black, Neutral 5 Value Gray, and Titanium White), I kept my annotations a "gray black"- dark enough they mark up the image with some helpful vandalism, but not so dark they're hard to cover up with subsequent passes. I did go in with a few darker value strokes to help with the tonal structure, knowing they'll sit well tonally when I continue. I think this helps the readability, but it also almost stopped me from continuing forward because I enjoyed how it looked after I had wrapped up this "stage". It has the charm of a painted sketch in both the "masses" of paint and the linear construction I love in drawing.

But, onward we go:

Last Tuesday evening I went back into the annotated image and pushed around some more paint, working out the tonal structure again through planar relationships, which I had already mapped out, so it was much easier to hone-in on them. I'm still using my acrylic method of slapping tonal shapes on top of other shapes, so there's a roughness to the form (exaggerated by my iPhone- but that's alright. You can see the tonal thinking I'm doing.) There are many ways to work a form, and none of them are "incorrect"- so it's a matter of finding a method that marries up well with your goals and process preferences. If I continue with this little study, I'll probably scumble to sculpt the in-between values and work to make the form feel "full" and graceful at the same time, like Dalou's sculpture. To be continued?

If you'd like to chat more about building up an image and navigating tonality in your work, check out my weekend online Grisaille workshop (now August 22nd & 23rd)​

An Interview with the Master of "Over-Painting" Himself

While we don't focus on his take on "over-painting", we cover almost everything else in this long-format conversation with the master painter Nicolás Uribe! This was my second podcast episode, and you can tell I'm still working out some of the details, but I had a blast talking with Nicolás. It was an honor getting to chat with him for so long and to really pick his brain- watch it over on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Join Us Over Zoom Tonight, 8/2 @ 6pm (For Free!)

I had to move my online grisaille workshop to the 22nd & 23rd- but I'm ready to Zoom now, so tonight I'll be hanging out over Zoom from 6pm - 9pm ET (NYC Time.) This evening will function a lot like one of our relaxed Tuesday evening Virtual Studio Hangouts- I'll be sharing what I'm working on and answering any questions (about anything related to art- not just what I'm working through on the easel at the moment.) If you'd like to join us, feel free to pop in and draw as well! We'll share images of what everybody worked on at the end of our meeting and chat about them for a bit.

I'm going to use charcoal to sketch through these annotation graphic refocusing concepts - these ideas don't just belong to painting!

Join Zoom Meeting (6pm ET)​
​https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82592403071?pwd=Ja1MvRhx0ovGInbMDpLthpYMcwNnk7.1​

Meeting ID: 825 9240 3071
Passcode: 364859

Thanks for being here and checking out the newsletter! This one was a lot of fun to put together. I hope you found it interesting. Do you use annotation/graphic refocusing/over-painting in your process at all? What's that look like? Let me know!

Happy drawing,
Evan​​

​​https://learn.theopensketchbook.com/​

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Check out the Virtual Studio:
​https://learn.theopensketchbook.com/bundles/virtual-studio​

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