Different Strokes

"Travelin' Shoes" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic on 10 x 5.5" paper. Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

This Different Strokes airport travelers challenge reminded me of Elvin Biship’s song, “Travelin’ Shoes,” which I put on repeat as I painted. These days the lyric should be, “gotta put on my (easy on easy off no metal shank) travelin’ shoes.” Nothing like some good foot stomping butt swinging music to make the hours fly by in the studio.

I loved the drama of Karin’s high contrast airport photo, but for my purposes it was a bit too dark. I couldn’t see the feet in the shadows, and I was having a hard time imagining what they might look like from that perspective. Also couldn’t see the colors in the darker cast shadows.  So I lightened the reference photo in Photoshop.

Here’s a quick explanation of the hows and whys of lightening shadows:

It’s difficult to capture the full range of light and dark in a single photo. If you expose the light parts correctly, the shadows might get get too dark. Expose the shadows so they glow, and the highlights burn out. As an example, I took four photos of plants on my kitchen windowsill.

In the first, the meter reading came from the impatiens on the right. They look okay, but everything else is too light. The coleus leaves on the left are disappearing in a white glare.

The second photo was exposed so the coleus on the left would look good. But now everything else is too dark! We can barely see the impatiens in the shadows.

The third photo uses the camera’s automatic settings, averaging the lights and darks  to arrive at something in-between. I’d love to be Goldilocks and be able to say this one is “just right,” but it’s not. The lights are too light, and the darks are too dark. These are some of the same auto-exposure issues I saw in the airport photo.

The fourth was taken with a flash. The colors are much closer to what I was seeing in real life, but the shadows are off because the main light source is from the front. I won’t paint from flash photos anymore, because it’s almost impossible to make the painting look like anything but a copy of a flash photo. Not good, when my goal is to make everything I paint look like it was painted from life.

Ideally, when taking reference photos I bracket the exposures, so I have good shots of both the light and dark areas. If I use a tripod, I can take it a step further and use HDR software to combine multiple images into one. Often that’s not possible, so what do we do when we have only one dark photo to work from? Here’s my quick Photoshop solution:

These are both photo #2, but in the second version I’ve lightened the shadows in Photoshop. This can be done using levels, or with the “lighten shadows” slider. It’s a quick, easy fix that selectively brings light back into the shadows without destroying detail in the lighter areas. This image is the closest to what I saw in real life. Gosh, I really need to scrub down that kitchen wall.

Here’s the same effect used on Karin’s photo:

Lightening the reference made the feet and shadow colors more visible, though I must admit I still had to fake the shape of the feet (and they still don’t look right).

Now, on to the painting. These are a few images I took along the way:

The acrylic underpainting loosely suggests where the light and shadow areas will be.

The sketch began with pastel pencil, so I could easily wipe off my mistakes and start over. I knew I’d be making a LOT of mistakes on this one.

Once the drawing was as good as I could get it, I started reinforcing some of my pastel lines with acrylic paint so I wouldn’t accidentally wipe off all my hard work.

More detail in acrylic. I was going to switch to oils before now because I thought it would be impossible to create a soft transition from light to shadow with acrylics.  Not so – my test transition was nicely fuzzy – so I kept going with the acrylics.

I paid special attention to the lower left corner, where several floor sections intersect in the middle of a shadow. Getting the values and colors right in that area were the key to creating the illusion of a shadowed terrazzo floor.

I gave the floor depth by making the speckles in the foreground bigger and brighter, fading them out as they receded into the background. Also it gets bluer as it recedes, just like a landscape.

One of the last details was to give the woman Captain’s stripes on her sleeve. I liked the idea of black heels and power.

Here’s a little Elvin Bishop, if you care to listen to my painting soundtrack:

"The View" by Lesley Spanos. Oil on 6 x 6" Gessobord panel. Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

My answer to Karin Jurick‘s Different Strokes City Rooftops challenge. Thank you, Karin, for another versatile reference photo. The shot was taken from her hotel room in San Francisco, which reminded of Gerry Beckley’s (America) “View From The Hotel” series of photographs. He shoots the view from every hotel on tour, even if it’s just a parking lot, then catalogs everything by date on his website. Very cool. These kind of shots remind me that it’s the more mundane views from our travels that are often the most interesting in retrospect.

This was a fun painting to tackle. Here are a few shots taken along the way:

First I laid down an undercoat of acrylic in greyed purple-ish tones found in one of the buildings in the background.  (It’s also the color of my bedroom.) Most of the foreground buildings will be yellow, so setting up a complementary color scheme early will hopefully keep the colors harmonious.

A loose drawing in grey marker went over the top of the acrylic.  Even though this won’t be an abstract, I’m looking for shapes that would be pleasing and balanced if abstracted.

These next few shots were taken in the studio at night with little color correction, so they look warmer than they actually are.

Next I start to apply the oil paint with a 1″ slant brush. Usually I try not to premix my paints much, but on this one I am because the colors are so delicate, and the values are so important. I’m even using a value card to get those values right.

Here’s a color I love: Naples yellow! Mixed with titanium white, it’s like creamy sunshine. It makes me happy just looking at it. I don’t use yellow ochre. Though many artists use it successfully, it’s dull and heavy in my hands.

Finally, I get to paint the metal thingies on the roof! I love painting metal. I’ve taken some artistic license and made them shinier than galvanized steel, more like stainless, just ’cause I love painting shiny things

Oopsy, some of those horizontal lines aren’t very horizontal – gotta fix that!

The final piece, shot outdoors and color balanced so it’s as accurate as possible. (Though I was kinda loving the red tones.)

I don’t know what time of day Karin took her photo, but I’ve been trying to portray the pale lemony light of early morning in San Francisco, with a bit of fog hovering in the distance.

If I’d been doing this image purely as a cityscape, I think I would have left off some of the fussier details, like the metal bands (probably an earthquake retrofit) on the building on the right. But in an abstract state of mind, I sought out and emphasized repeating shapes and rhythms, and those bands gave me an opportunity for a nice vertical rhythm. I tried to hit every number between one and six when I chose how many items to put in each group of images. Maybe it’s just me, but I believe this creates a rhythm which is pleasing in a Sesame Street kind of way.

"Chocolate, Vanilla, Chocolate" by Lesley Spanos. Oil on diagonal 6 x 6" Gessobord panel. Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

Our Different Strokes From Different Folks challenge subject this week is cupcakes. Now, I love cupcakes, even if I don’t eat them. In fact, I firmly believe that some of the most exciting things happening in the arts these days are taking place in cupcake world. If you want to see what I mean, take a look at one of my favorite blogs, Cupcakes Take The Cake. Such creativity! We painters find it hard to do anything that hasn’t been done before, but the cupcake artists are giddy with exploring new territory every day. Or maybe it’s just a sugar high.

Karin’s reference photo was reminiscent of a Wayne Thiebaud painting. He’s one of my absolute favorite artists of all time, so to try to copy him would be a sacrilege. I’d fall terribly short of my goal and embarrass myself. Like this:

"I'm no Wayne Thiebaud" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic on 7 x 5" museum board. Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

But I had to try. This first attempt was done with a lot of modeling paste in the “frosting.” I thought I could shape it to look like 3-d, but it was a lot harder than I expected. I mean, do I let the frosting cast its own shadows and light the painting just right when it’s done, or do I paint the shadows in in addition to the texture so if the lighting isn’t just right they will still show? I can’t remember how Thiebaud did it. I just know that mine looked lame no matter what I did to it, and it was impossible to photograph the texture.

So, that’s the tosser.

My second attempt was more traditional, with little texture, and shadows painted in. The hardest part was getting all those little confetti quins the right color in both light and shadow.

Here are a few images taken along the way:

Happy one year anniversary to all Strokers!

"Telegraph Hill" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic on paper. Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

This was one of those crazy weeks when I thought I’d never get anything done for the current Different Strokes From Different Folks challenge hosted by Karin Jurick. My first mistake was forgetting to seal the paper before I started painting in oils. The paper sucked all the oils out of the paint and it felt like Play-Doh under my brush. I should’ve just started over, but I kept torturing myself with it. Here’s where it was when I abandoned it:

"Up Telegraph Hill" by Lesley Spanos. Oil painting on paper. Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

It didn’t totally suck – the light was okay in parts of it – but I didn’t like how tentative it looked. It was obvious I was unsure of myself and was adding detail just because I didn’t know what else to do.

I needed to loosen up, and it was too early in the day for wine, so I turned on some music, got out my acrylics, out and did a quickie:

Not pretty, but it got me out of that paint-every-detail mindset so I could move on. I started wondering how much detail I could omit and still have it read as a street on a hill. Using the same colors I used in the first painting, I painted this:

I almost left it like that, but I thought it needed a couple more identifying elements:

Hopefully now it looks more like city streets than a canyon.

I tried a new technique to get the telephone pole straight: I dipped the edge a piece of cardboard in paint and stamped it on.

This is going to be one of those paintings people either like, or will say “WTF?”

Just in case any of you artists are still working on this challenge and need a street view of some of the finer details, here’s the location:
View Larger Map

This is actually a block closer than Karin’s view, at the 3-way intersection at the bottom of the hill. I know that view well – Karin was probably next to the San Francisco Art Institute when she took the reference photo. There’s a cable car line that goes from Taylor to Columbus in this intersection, so painting in a cable car wouldn’t be out of the question. (I thought about it…) Just around the corner on Columbus, you’ll see the world famous Bimbo’s 365 Club. Up at the top of Telegraph Hill a couple of blocks over is Coit Tower, which has some really cool murals in it.

"Waiting" by Lesley Spanos. Oil on paper, 11 x 8". Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

This is the latest from Karin Jurick’s Different Strokes From Different Folks challenge. Though I know this was a figure challenge, what really attracted my eye was the chair on the left. I loved the contrast of textures, the shiny metal and smooth leather. So I copped out and beheaded the poor man so he wouldn’t detract from that beautiful chair.

Here are a few images taken along the way:

"Chicago Lifeguard" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic on paper, 8 x 12". Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

Here’s the latest challenge from Karin Jurick’s Different Strokes From Different Folks. This time we’re painting a floating lifeguard on Lake Michigan. I wonder what it’s like out there, isolated on that little boat for hours at a time? Is it a fun way to spend the summer, or the world’s more boring job?

Here are some images taken along the way. I spent too much time watching the Michael Jackson memorial on TV, so no time left for commentary today: