Posts made in February, 2009

"Chocolate Mousse Heart Cake" by Lesley Spanos. Oil painting on 5 x 5" Gessobord. Copyright ©2009 Lesley Spanos, all rights reserved.

So for Valentine’s Day, I watched my husband eat cake. We searched several bakeries to find just the right cake. Something oooey-goooey and yummy for him (chocolate, of course), and something visually delightful for me to paint. Don’t pity me – we also found a great deal on a couple of small lobster tails for Valentine’s dinner. The hubby grilled them. OMG, they were amazing, and such a beautiful red-orange color!

Here are some shots I took along the way:

Eventually I’ll get around to painting the whole cake, but for now I decided to start with a slice so the chocolate mousse filling – yet another interesting element – would be exposed.

This is the first time I’ve used Ampersand Gessobord (note spelling – no “a” in “bord”), and it was a little different than painting on canvas. I had to fight the acrylic underpainting to get it to go on evenly, but overall, I was pleased. Any problems I have with it are just a matter of inexperience. Because it’s smooth, this stuff will be better than canvas for reproductions. Nothing screams “reproduction” louder than a canvas weave printed on flat paper.

I’m really enjoying my new tube of M. Graham Terra Rosa. It works great for painting the red-toned chocolate frosting and cake.  What I’m sorely missing in my palette is a good cool red or magenta so I can mix a nice magenta-pink color for the berries.

Here’s most of the painting blocked in, with details just starting to take shape.  The blackberry in the foreground was starting to look really sumptuous  at this point, like it’s bursting with sweet juice. I wish I’d added just a tiny bit more detail and stopped there.

But did I? Noooo! Of course not! I ignored the nice suggestions made after my last post, and worked it until the paint was exhausted and screaming for mercy. The direction the painting was going was definitely “worse” rather than “better,” so I decided to call it done and post it. That’s the “finished” piece, up above.

As I wrote this post, I found myself whining about how the blackberry in the foreground didn’t look as good as it did in the last stage. That berry really bothered me. It was all I could see. It’s always like that for me – if I paint twenty things right, it’s the one wrong thing that grabs 100% of my attention. “Why whine?” I asked myself. “Just fix it!”

So I grabbed it off the drying rack and blacked out both berries before I lost my nerve:

Once I did that, the whole balance of the painting changed for the better. The top berry receded into the background more, and the foreground berry no longer competed for attention with the chocolate frosting. The composition didn’t look as jumbled because I’d made the primary and secondary elements more clear.

In the end, the trick was in putting on just enough detail to make black holes look like berries, without ending up with the same too-detailed- too-light berries I painted before. I redid them a couple more times, and learned a little something each time.  I made a conscious effort to keep the colors dark, and use as few brushstrokes as possible. I’m satisfied now.

Thanks for stopping by and reading my ramblings!

Here's how the cake looked on Valentine's Day before I slaughtered it for the sake of art. Copyright ©2009 Lesley Spanos, all rights reserved.

"Harley-Davidson Heritage Softail" motorcycle painting by Lesley Spanos. Oil on archival 9 x 12" Raymar canvas panel. ©Copyright 2009, all rights reserved.

Fortunately I had my camera with me the day I saw this Harley in a parking lot at the Indiana State Fair.  I’m not a motorcycle person, but this thing was a work of art. It was gorgeous. The chrome was blindingly shiny, reflecting sky and clouds and earth. The painting is small, only 9 x 12″, but I’m imagining how cool it would look painted life-size or a little bigger.

Painting chrome is new to me, so I fussed with it a lot and was never was completely satisfied. I’m starting to understand it better though. Next time I need to be bolder with the strokes, and think of them as abstract squiggles.

Here are some shots I took along the way:

The canvas was toned with a sloppy mix of acrylics using a big brush. I suppose I should make a better drawing right from the start, but usually I just begin painting with minimal pencil guidelines and refine as I go with paint. But really… that wheel is pathetic, and if I’d started with a good wheel, I could have saved an hour of “refining.”

There’s one part of this painting I love – the background! I made a few pastel color mixtures, thinning the paint a lot, then slopped it on casually. It’s loose and colorful, but not so much that it detracts from the bike.

Finally the big shapes were in place and the wheel was looking less wonky, so I was able to start adding details.

The final step was all about making the chrome “pop” by adding the final darkest darks and lightest lights.

I could probably keep torturing this one for hours, but I think I’ll call it done and get back to painting some desserts. Probably something chocolate. I have a new tube of a color called Terra Rosa sitting here, and it almost looks like chocolate right out of the tube. Can’t wait to try it!

"Canyon" by Lesley Spanos. Oil on paper, 6 x 15". Copyright 2009, all rights reserved.

Today I felt the need to break away from small paintings and tiny brushes and cut loose. Funny how I always want to paint loosely, but my paintings get tight anyway. I know that happens to a lot of us, but why? Why is it so hard to leave things a little less refined?

I love the look of paint just doing its thing. My favorite paintings look like piles of paint up close, and something real from a distance. The kind of paintings that keep me walking up to the wall, then back ten feet, over and over, trying to see how the artist created his magic.

I don’t know if I could ever achieve that look, but if I don’t try, I won’t for sure. So on this one I forced myself to keep it loose by using only big brushes and unmixed paint. I think the smallest brush I used here was a #10. What a mess I made! I got paint everywhere – on my hands, on my sleeves, on my coffee mug. Did you know that Shout Ultra Gel laundry stain remover is really good at getting wet oil paint out of clothing? I didn’t until today. It has a little brush attachment on the end that rubs the paint right out. My long-sleeved black T-shirt once again has black sleeves!

The reference is from the Wet Canvas image reference library, and was posted for a challenge on the landscape forum. I’m still working up the nerve to post my version over there.

I was painting so quickly and was so covered in paint, I only got one in-progress shot. For what it’s worth, here it is:

"Chocolate Caramel Lava Cake" by Lesley Spanos. Oil painting on 5 x 5" canvas on panel. Copyright © Lesley Spanos 2009, all rights reserved.

The hubby has fully embraced the idea of me painting desserts and him eating them. Thanks to his enthusiastic purchases, I already have hundreds of dessert photos and a backlog of subjects awaiting me! There was this chocolate caramel lava cake he brought home last week, followed by an individual heart cake dipped in white chocolate and swirled with dark chocolate. Then there was the decadent chocolate mousse multi-serving heart-shaped layer cake we both picked out on Valentine’s Day. It had some pretty glazed berries on top that caught the light beautifully, so I’m really looking forward to painting that one sometime this week.

As always, here are some shots taken along the way:

The canvas, toned with acrylics.  I toned a handful of these a couple of weeks ago, which is why all the recent ones have been pretty much the same color. This one’s a little dark. I find I like them best when they’re a couple of steps lighter than my darkest shadow color.

The drawing is done with waterproof ink, directly on the canvas.

That bit of caramel on the top was a PITA to do, but I learned a lot and next time it will be easier. What I wasn’t getting at first is that it’s a little translucent, and a tiny bit of light shines through it.

Because the underpainting was too dark, I had to scrub in a halo of light around the cake so it wouldn’t be lost in the background.

This was my first fork. Yes, I was a virgin, but now that I have forked, I must admit that I liked it! It was much less painful than I thought it would be. Just a matter of observing the colors and painting what I saw.

I’ve also been forced to scrub a haze of lighter color on the foreground.

Note to self: Next time make the underpainting lighter!

Added some highlights, and we’re done! It actually looks much better in person than it does in a photo. We’re going to keep this one – I promised it to the hubby for Valentine’s Day.

"Tiramisu" by Lesley Spanos. Oil painting on 5 x 5" canvas panel. Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

My husband tells me he’s “on board 100%” with the idea of me painting more desserts. He gets to eat them, I get to photograph and paint them. Years ago, it would have driven me insane to look at something like this and not eat it, but now I find I really am over sugar.

So for our latest effort he brought home this Tiramisu. As Tiramisu goes, it wasn’t the most attractive, but he said it tasted great.

Here are some images taken along the way:

Once again, I started with an acrylic underpainting on one of my homemade 5 x 5″ canvas panels. I could buy panels, but they’d cost more and I wouldn’t have the same kind of control I have with these. If I make them myself, I can make any size I want, and I know exactly what kind of materials were used.

The drawing is done in ink, and the Tiramisu is painted in oils.

I thought the chocolate-covered coffee bean would be the hardest part, but also the most gratifying if I could get it right. It turns out the coffee bean was easy. It was the whipped cream that was hard! I fussed with it quite a bit before deciding I’d done as much as I could with it.

Looking back, I think maybe I should have rounded the cake pieces so they looked more like the biscuits traditionally used, rather than sharp-edged cut strips of cake our bakery used as a shortcut. Sometimes I follow the photo too closely and forget that it’s my painting, and I can build my painted Tiramisu any way I want.

I’m enjoying these little desserts so much, I’m already planning a series of them so I can group a couple dozen of them together on a poster. My only worry is that my husband will gain 20 lbs if I keep painting this stuff.