Today I am going to give a brief overview of the painting process of this painting. I found the subject matter interesting in a number of ways. The human figure looks like he is a meditative and reflective state while at the same time there seems to be a friendly and peaceful relationship with the monkey. It also reminded me of when I was young and I had this obsession that I wanted a small monkey as a pet, however this never happened. It also reminded me of our connection as humans with mother nature and especially with the other creatures with whom we share our life on this planet. It is also a reminder that we are part of the natural world from which we all are coming. 

From the artistic perspective I loved the combination of colours and contrasts. The background is fairly neautral leaning towards a low chroma orange which contrasts with the relatively high chroma complementary bluish tones of the turban. Other complementary contrasts are red/green and yellow/purple.

As a surface I prepared a stretched fine linen, primed with three layers of acrylic primer. The initial tonal sketch was done using raw umber which was allowed to dry for a day and then painted over with a second layer of transparent red oxide red. Both of these paints dry very quickly.

After allowing the painting to dry for couple of days I proceeded to the next layer of paint, where I started introducing more colour and opaque paint. A 50% cold pressed linseed oil was used as medium and added to the paint. After identifying the colour groups, an mid-range colour was initially mixed and adjusted to create a tonal variation of that colour suitable to use for shadows and light. The darker but warm underpaint helped me to establish and control the tone as well as for the darker areas in the shadows.

The last stage was focused to continue modifying the tones in each section of the painting, usually darkening the shadows and lightening where needed. During this stage both scumbling (for opaque paint) and glazing (using transparent paint) are used to continue adjusting the tones while creating more form.

The painting is currently in its final stages where I might do some minor and final adjustments before signing it.

I would like to share with you an over view of this still life painting. I always found still life painting as the best way to learn the various aspects of painting. Still life teaches you to see shapes and to observe with your naked eyes the subtle changes in colour and tone. These two are usually miss-represented in photography as the camera is not able to see what your eyes and brain can. It also teaches you about composition since a still life is not simply a collection of objects as in a bazaar store. 

From the technical perspective every object will have a different difficulty how to approach it and how to apply the paint onto the surface. For this painting I chose a highly reflective metal tea pot, a tea cup, tea bag and a pear to include some colour. 

The overall big shape of the composition running between the main objects is a triangular shape with the string coming of the tea bag and hanging off the edge creates a very gentle leading line to the main subjects. The objects are painted almost the same size as the real objects and are partly touching or coming off the edges of the canvas. I did this specifically to make the viewer feel like being part of the painting. This is an approach Caravaggio used in a number of his paintings. 

The green background is the complementary colour to the red design on the cup and the purplish tag of the teabag complements the yellowish colours of the pear. 

As support I used a 30 x 30 cm cotton canvas attached to a wooden surface and pre-stained with a middle tone mix of alkyd oil burnt umber mixed with titanium white. The solid wooden surface protects the paint layers as it does not allow the canvas to experience repeated cycles of shrinkage as a result of the constantly changing atmospheric humidity. The light position for this still life was at the very top and I used a small neutral white light (5000k) 

The colour palette is as follows cremnitz white, titanium white, ultramarine blue, pyrrole rubine, burnt sienna, burnt umber, yellow ochre, Indian yellow and cadmium lemon. Paints are from Michael Harding, Blue Ridge, Old Holland, Gamblin and Williamsburg. Cold pressed linseed oil was used as medium added only in the second layer of paint.

Most of this painting was painted "Alla Prima" with only slight adjustments of tone and addition of detail onto the initial layer. I always start from the darkest objects, so here I started from the teapot. Most people have the impression that metallic objects are very difficult to paint, I find it the opposite. The teapot was painted using chromatic black (a mix burnt umber and ultramarine blue) adjusting and lighting up the value to almost a mid value grey. The reflections are painted with a low chroma version of the colours used for the objects being reflected. The contrast between values gives the illusion that the painted object is metallic. Still life painting teaches you to observe chroma and makes you realise how low in chroma are real objects around us. From painting the teapot I moved on to the background followed by the pear. The most challenging were the tea cup and tea bag that mainly consist of high value blue tint mixed with umber. The golden colour is a mix of burnt sienna, umber and Indian yellow from dark to light value. Painting the pear was an interesting and fun part of the painting because one can observe all the effects of light on a single object starting from the reflective  and shiny top part to the dark shadows and reflected light at the bottom coming from the background colours and the white cloth on the table.

The short video demonstrated the application of paint while painting the tea cup. Hope you enjoy.

Today I am going to share with you some tips about painting from life. Painting from life is one of the best ways to learn how to draw and paint. Besides the techniques that one can learn such a brush work, painting from life also helps you improve seeing subtle changes in colour while improving your observational skills. Both of these are essential if you want to become a better artist. My 3 years of training were almost entirely based on drawing from life objects and this helped me a lot when I came to the stage to paint. 

For this painting I chose the subject matter of drinking coffee. Drinking coffee is almost a ubiquitous activity across almost all nations. I wanted a simple composition consisting of the necessary tools including the mocha coffee pot, cup and spoon together with the raw ingredient, the coffee bean. This series of still life paintings is going to be focused to remind us about the connection between our daily activities with nature. Most of the time in this industrial age where everything is presented to us ready made, people lost touch with nature. 

I used a shadow box with a coloured background with a complementary colour to the objects. The mocha pot was placed towards the right hand side and light directed from the top left, casting shadows to towards the left, linking the objects. The reflective surface of the pot was also reflecting the bluish colour from the cup and the orange colour from the right hand side of the box. The spoon is leaning towards the edge of the table and of the canvas. The easel was placed close and towards the side of the shadow box, with the palette on the right and a small table on the left. Having all the tools needed handy is very important and helps to avoid distractions during the painting process.

The painting surface chosen is a cotton canvas attached to a 30 x 30 cm wooden panel, ready to hang, primed with an oil primer and prestained with mid value neutral alkyd oil mix of burnt umber and titanium white. This initial layer was prepared months ago.

The chosen palette for this painting is very limited and consists of Flake White replacement (Gamblin), ultramarine blue (Williamsburg), cadmium lemon (Blue Ridge), burnt umber (Michael Harding), pyrrole ruby red (Blue Ridge) with a touch of phthalo blue green shade  (Blue Ridge). The medium used was linseed oil. Most of this painting was done "Alla prima". Starting from the darkest object, the cup, moving on gradually towards the mid-range ones and to the lighter ones. This was done on purpose to prevent accidental contamination with titanium white of the darker colours. I used a colour checker to isolate and check the tones where necessary.

Today I am sharing with you part of the painting process of a painting I am currently working on. The scenery shows a view over the town of Bright in Victoria from Tower Hill Lookout. I visited this place couple of weeks ago at two different times of the day, at around sunset and mid-day. On my visits I prepared a plein air sketch and did a photo shoot of the whole scenery. Plein air sketching/painting is the best way of documenting the landscape as it gives you the capability to understand the landscape much better than taking photos, for the simple reason that you do observation from reality. Our eyes can see far more details than a camera could see. A camera is a machine and hence does not have a brain to created the illusion of reality. However its very difficult to capture the landscape at sunset and when the weather and light are constantly changing. So in that situation I preferred to use the camera to capture the light and my memory to record the atmosphere and the feel/smell of the air after the rain. 

This painting is a composite of three elements, plein air sketches, photography and memory. Its going to be painted on stretched linen 101 x 85 cm using oil paints. The first image above shows the first layer of paint (block in) where the main shapes and tones are established. Will keep you updated about the progress of this painting.

Painting outdoors is the best way not only to learn how to paint the landscape but also gives you the opportunity to experience being part of the same landscape. This experience will help you to understand better the subject matter that you are painting and to translate that onto the canvas. Apart from the visual senses one will also be translating the whole experience captured by the other senses, hearing the sounds of the birds, water, winds as well as feeling the heat or the cold air around that will affect the overall execution of your painting. I was camping around Lake Hume overnight and the next morning came out to be a very beautiful sunny and warm day. So while sitting there observing the view I observed a nice combination of shapes and complementary colour contrasts. So I took out my easel and paint box together with a small canvas panel. To help me construct the view I used a view finder same size as the canvas panel. I used a palette consisting of Ultramarine blue, phthalo blue, flake white replacement, permanent orange, cadmium lemon, Venetian red, ivory black, yellow ochre, Indian yellow, Pyrrole rubine and magenta. To help establish the light value of the lower part of the sky I used a colour checker. Working fast and from back to front I established the lightest and the darkest tones to start with, so that all the rest is in between. 
The end result is above. Happy with the outcome and the execution of this painting.

I painting this waterfall some time ago. This is the way I usually tackle this subject. The palette I used is given in the video. One of the major issues that usually is encountered when painting subjects with a lot of white paint such as water is that one uses the white paint too early. As you might see the first layers of the waterfall were painted with a middle tone greyish blue, rising the value as I progressed. In this painting, as in most of my other paintings I use a combination of brushes and painting knife to create the various effects and tectures in the landscape. Hope that you enjoy.

Couple of months ago I started this small experiment to test how light affects various pigments and mixtures of paint that we commonly use in painting. I am interested in some particular pigments since although they are very popular and were traditionally used, however now we know that these are in fact not as stable as one thinks and hence they tend to disappear with time especially on exposure to light. The technical term used in labelling on tubes is "lightfast" usually graded (numbered with an ASTM prefix or starred) with 1 being the best hence meaning that that pigment is very resistant to light even if exposed to sunlight. As an artist I am always trying to use the best and most stable pigments available on the market, preferably from brands that use the minimum amount of fillers and driers, since both of these affect the stability of the paint as time passes. My objective is always to give the best quality artwork that lasts for long time to my clients. Besides that I also want that the hours that I spend working on a painting will be worth it.

The experiment is going to take at least a year and today I am reporting some of the preliminary observations I did after 5 months from the start. The paints that I used were: lead/zinc white - PW1/PW4 (Old Holland), Ultramarine Blue - PB29 (Michael Harding), Cobalt Blue light - PB28 (Norma), Pyrrole red - PR254 (Langridge), Quinacridone Magenta - PR122 (Langridge) and Rose Madder Genuine - NR9 (Michael Harding).

I prepared some colour swatches on cotton canvas after first mixing the colour and preparing tints to around mid-value 5 on the Munsell scale on a glass palette. I prepared three replicates of each colour, one for each lighting condition. 3 lighting conditions were used: (1) normal room light conditions (similar to same condition a painting is normally hanged); (2) No light stored in a dark cupboard; (3) Exposed to sunlight in a window. I used these 3 lighting conditions because I wanted to test the performance of the pigment in conditions as close to the real situation as possible. So although manufacturers test the lightfastness by exposing the pigments to light however normally paintings are kept hanged on walls in doors and are not exposed to the lighting conditions used for testing. Also one needs to remember that each pigment might behave the same in oils and acrylics and differently than watercolour, so one needs to look at the lightfastness according to medium.

After 5 months I took them out to perform the first observational analysis by first photographing them and then analyzing the photos using a photography software to measure the intensities of the values and the three primary colours of light known as the RGB system (Red, Green and Blue). Using the software I used the colour picker function taking readings from various spots across each coloured squares and then calculating an average value. I took readings from areas having a similar value, using the values to normalise the results. I then calculated ratios of red/blue to check for colour shifts in the mixtures. A common mix of grays used in landscapes is that using either ultramarine blue or cobalt blue with one of each of the above red paints toned to a mid-tone value.

What I observed? So far the results didn't show any shift in colour between the conditions for the mass tones. Mass tone refers to the colour as it comes out from the tube. A control consisting of cadmium yellow light (PY35) known to be excellent lightfast did not showed any changes.
Some slight changes were observed in the mid-tone of Rose Madder Genuine and Cobalt blue exposed to sunlight. It was expected that Rose Madder will show a difference as it is known not to be excellent lightfast, however cobalt blue was a very surprising finding.
Both mixtures of cobalt and ultramarine blue with rose madder show a decline in red colour with ratios 0.58 vs 0.45, respectively, between dark and sun exposed. There were no changes for magenta however a slight change was observed for pyrrole when exposed to sunlight which I need to follow up with more testing on this pigment.

The pigments were returned to their original conditions for further testing within couple of more months. From my observations so far it seems that magenta is the best cool red to choose. I will need to compare the pyrrole red as a cool-warm red with permanent orange PO73 that can be used to give grayer hues when mixed with ultramarine blue.

To continue on the same topic of my last post this time I am going to talk about how as an artist you can train yourself to see subtle changes in value. This is very important if you want to draw and paint realism, since it is the most important factor that allows you to create a three dimensional illusion on a flat surface.

In a sequential way of teaching usually students wanting to learn to paint realism will need to master their drawing skills using graphite and later on charcoal. In my opinion charcoal is a better and easier to manipulate than graphite for this purpose. However with both media one is only dealing with black and white (usually of the surface) and so one only needs to control how light or dark the application is...known as value. When one moves to colour this becomes more complicated as it is not easy to see value in colour and besides that another factor becomes part of the equation..known as chroma (saturation or intensity).

So before moving to color one can use black and white paint to render tonal studies from casts. Using a white cast is the first step since one can clearly see all the elements of the effect of light on form, that are highlights, mid-tones, form shadow and cast shadows. And you can accomplish this by simply mixing various shades of gray starting from at least 5 main tones and then intermixing these together to create the intermediates as you progress and you realise that actually there are much more variations in tones than you first observed.

Doing it from life rather than from a photo is better because our eyes are sensitive to an unlimited range of values to which the photographic camera is not sensitive enough and hence not able to capture. Beside that painting from life gives you more skill to measure proportions accurately.

The image above shows the setup, where I hanged the cast on a black board standing on an easel and I positioned my working easel to the right to the front. The illumination was from the light at the top on my painting easel. I used an averaged light colour temperature from 2 LED tubes (4000K and 6000K). At the front of the cast I hanged a plumb line which helps me to align myself to the same view point to the cast at all time. As paints I used Mars Black (Langridge) and Flake white replacement (Gamblin). Please note that in the photo the angle and position of the camera were different from my eye level. It took approximately 6 hours to finish this small study (15 x 20 cm).

One of the most difficult tasks for any artist that wants to paint realism is to get the right values. Without getting the right values, painted objects will remain flat. Value change in colour is what gives the illusion of form. Certain colours have a high or low inherent value, that is naturally they are either dark or light.

In order to start seeing value changes and mix colours of the right values one needs to first understand the basic concept of how light affects various shapes. Starting from simple geometric shapes one can move to more complex objects. One needs to train the eyes and brain to see these subtle changes in values sometimes not that obvious to the untrained eye especially when it comes to light coloured objects. There are various ways how you can check yourself while painting to see that you are mixing the right colurs of the correct values, or to check whether you have the right values on the canvas. The easiest way to do it is to move back and to look at the canvas from a distance. Most of the time you will immediately observe a darker area that looks odd when compared to the adjacent values.
The other way is to move back and squint at the painting and objects. Squinting your eyes will filter the amount of light entering your eyes and the colours in front of you will become grey and hence easier to judge their values.
Another way which works for me is to compare to a grey scale. You can prepare one yourself from your own paints and keep it as a reference. When doing a still life like above I place the grey scale next to the object and compare the darkness of the coloured object with the scale. By squinting you should be able to judge well. I compare in a way like bracketing in a camera, where I compare to a lighter and a darker tone to confirm the real tone. With time your eyes will immediately judge the values correctly. Taking a photo of the finished painting and converting it to black and white using software will also help you to check your values. Both the apple and the landscape were checked in this way.
Finally if you want to develop a sensitivity to colour and to judge values (and chroma) correctly when mixing paint you will need to do a number of exercises using simple still life objects and trying to match the exact colours as you see them. Even half an hour every couple of days should be good enough. You will be amazed how the body quickly learns what to do.