FUN at FUNSIZE

This being one of the coldest January's on the books has offered a little more fun then just freezing your food without the aid of a big clunky rectangle. For instance, even the depths of Cayuga lake couldn't keep the edges of its body from freezing over. At Long Point state park just down the road, Lana and I have been sliding on the ice like a couple of ostriches in the artic...at least I have been. What really came as a surprise was the crystal clear spot in the middle of the launch area which appeared to be calm water; however, after hurling a couple of rocks onto it we quickly found out that it was thick ice. Sometimes spine tingling cracking noises spread themselves throughout the ice, always a scare, but with the majority of the ice being well over the required 2" thickness there isn't too much to worry about.

Fun facts about ice walking:
-the minimal thickness required for the average person to navigate on ice is 2"
-if you fall through the ice, it is best to grab hold of anything solid and trudge your way up back to solid ground.
-hypothermia is when your body temp. falls below 95 degrees, depending on water temp. this happens roughly 2-3 minutes after you have been submerged.
-for any more info., please contact Bear Grylls.

Diffusing the light

Windows are great, an excellent source of light and scenery; however, sometimes they can be a distraction (and a source of freezing air). The sun winds its course throughout the day and as it does the sun moves and often creates annoying glare or blinding light, which makes it tough to paint through, also when it is windy and cold windows let in cold air. Besides when its this time of the year in upstate NY, anything that makes you seem warmer and safer is good. So in order to solve this problem you can go to Home Depot and pick up some inch long screws and lengths of 1.5 inch thick pine strips (get enough to make it around the perimeter of your window), a package of drop cloth with one fabric side and one plastic side, also pick up some smaller strips of wood to divide the final shape with. Cut the pieces to fit the inner most dimensions of your window on a chop saw and screw them together, remember , you will have to overlap them. Cut the smaller strips to fit inside the screen frame and position it however you will and screw it tight. Make sure the frame fits, then stretch the drop cloth (plastic toward the glass) like you would stretch a canvas to a frame using a staple gun. Trim the edges and enjoy!
P.S. Coming soon, the finished morinaga milk caramel image!

Bon-Bon Finished!

The only thing left is to varnish it!

Pills

Here's a smaller painting (4.5"x4.5").

Some pills, oil on panel. This one had a burnt umber wash in over a drawing, black and white underpainting, and then a glaze with a couple finishing color layers on top. I was thinking about this traditional process demonstrated here at this youtube video.

Where we work & how to keep it clean

This is the studio. Our new 8 ft long painting is on the wall! Dots!

It's very time consuming to keep it as clean as it is right now. But I'm not complaining; it's totally worth the effort. The space is great, very easy to move studio furniture around as needed. But too bad the walls aren't one solid stud-- the cleats have limited placement.

Keeping it clean requires daily vacuuming, and a wet mop/wipe down at least every other day. As little as there is in here, a lot of dust gets generated. Brett and I are looking into Pro-Wear (as seen in 'Idiocracy') as an alternative to cotton fabrics, as most dust seems to be generated by us. Thankfully, the dust doesn't stick to the floor. All surfaces get dust collected on them.... but keeping the clean studio keeps tension low and is very gratifying.

When I have to clean the white drafting table (seen in the left area of the pic), I almost always have to scrape up old dust buildup (which can occur after 2 days), gunky drying mediums of various kinds, and oil paint. It's pretty easy to do--- just use a little effort and rub (read: scrub thoroughly) the table down with turp natural and scrape with a razorblade, being careful not to nick the table. Then soap and water and dry. If you don't take off the turp natural, the table will get sticky within a few hours and lots of dust will stick.

See you again tomorrow!

After Some Elbow Grease

Here's the dum-dum further along--
In the left (sorry for such a blurry pic), I've added one more layer of color (since the previous entry) for this preliminary loose sketch.
One layer later, after that last step dried, I just worked through the whole thing with brushes, directly painting the still life. I think one more touchup after this dries will finish off this little exercise.

Reflections

I spent the past few days taking on the most difficult task yet! The saucer of this teacup has many ripples, evenly spaced, which slope down to the center where the cup sits. Along its edge, the saucer also bends in and out in accordance with the height of the ripples. The material is very shiny and very smooth, therefore, it changes whenever the light does. Even more fun is the fact that the cup sitting over the shiny saucer gets oddly reflected into the surface and bent around every ripple. Put all of this into an elliptical perspective and onto a 3' x 4ft' panel and you have before you one daunting task, with only one way to approach it....DIVE IN!

Grabbing 10 paint brushes and a huge grisaille pallet I went to work making everything happen with the paint and no under-drawing. I was really afraid of having uneven values which makes the painting the look doughy and ugly. Using big brushes and keeping my eye on the pallet helped to keep things going smoothly. A simple --but crucial-- rule for reflections is that no matter how confusing they may look, they are simply an image being projected onto an underlying surface. This was particularly tough here because the underlying surface was so forshortened. Getting through it required slowing down, and following the course of every ripple. During this project I began to see just how chaotic these relatively mechanical images become.

Start of small Dum-dum

I (Lana) started this this morning. For now I have to stop and let it dry before I can do the next layer. It's only 4x5 inches.

1: Light loose pencil drawing.
2: Initial block in with color (oil+turp). That dried very fast.
3: Second block in with color- now the following layers will stick better.

Next to come is lots of elbow-grease detail work (tightening up). I am trying to approach this in a very relaxed way and hoping as I work longer on it, it will get wherever it needs to go.

Bon-bon Progress

Here's the Bon-bon. It's just about finished. It's gone relatively smoothly. A better photo of the finished painting will come soon. This painting is 2x3 feet and is oil on mdf.
We didn't have any photos from the beginning of it but you'll be able to see what we did.
1: This was taken after the drawing was done. At first we penciled and inked it with a Sakura Micron pen, but the gessoed surface ruined the pen. So we finished by oil painting over the pencil lines (see the center of the top half of the wrapper..ever so slightly thicker lines). After the drawing, the white was killed by some ivory black + turpenoid. The bottom and pieces of the top have a grey underpainting.
2: The grey underpainting is farther along.
3: With the underpainting complete, the red glaze was applied.
4: The green glaze went on the top part of the strawberry foil. The first layer of the yellow background was applied. The yellow didn't cover so well over that. (Learning from this, during this stage on the teacup, we tried to leave the area around the cup as clean as possible so that the background color would cover better.. but it was still messy..)
5: Grey seeds were painted back in.
6: Near completion! Another layer on the background yellow; heightened detail, color tweaks in the wrapper, yellow seeds glazed and painted in. The tiniest touches are the only things left to perfect it (but those tiny touches may have a significant impact).

This painting has been very fun to do. Only one main glaze of the red and green nearly finished the painting, thanks to the detailed grey underpainting.

Teacup Progress

Here is the teacup! It's only about half done... This painting has really been trouble from the start. Nothing ever dries on this thing... huge waits between layers. Siccatives don't really cut down the wait on this thing... the underpainting just hasn't dried... This is 3 x 4 feet on mdf panel.
Here's what's going on:
1: The pencil drawing goes on the panel. Like I said, trouble-- We freehanded the line using a shipcurve and a grid proportioning system to make sure all the ellipses were accurate. (This took a little longer than you might expect...) We didn't fix the drawing, but instead, inked it with a Nikko spoon pen and black india ink.
2: Time to 'kill the white.' We washed in ivory black mixed with turpenoid/oms (This is parallel to the brownish yellow wash in for the Morinaga box).
3: Next, instead of painting the greyscale, we erased out the dried black wash in with a kneaded and rubber eraser. The grid lines came through from the pencil drawing stage. Also the first layer of the background went on. As you can see, it didn't cover the turp very well at all. Bummer...
4: Some of the grayscale painting went on anyway. But the eraser-drawing half helped this paint layer because of the large planes we have to sort through. There was white cut in against what will become painted gold. The greyscale painting will also help the future blue glazes on the cup and saucer.
5: Next, the colors of the gold in the cup were partitioned. And the first blue glaze went on the teacup (That took over a week to dry..)!
6: Detail work in the gold in the cup plus a little aureolin glaze to unify hues in the gold. A flat hue for the gold was put in around the bottom of the cup. The teacup white bottom is painted in a little more, in a direct way.

This painting is especially tricky because we have to make sure every plane reads perfectly, due to the very regular/perfect ellipses. Any bit of drawing that's innaccurate is sure to fight against whatever convincing quality we're trying to achieve. We have a loooong way to go on this yet....

Morinaga Milk Caramel Progress

So far, each painting is a real grab bag, every one seems to be coming to completion in different ways. Some require a black and white underpainting, some just plain direct painting, others require more transparent color glazes.

The only similarities are that each panel starts out with several layers of gesso which are power sanded. Also, because the surface is so smooth, there is also some kind of thin layer applied over the drawing so that the thicker layers of paint can adhere better and cover more opaquely in less time.

Here is the progress on one of the paintings. The painting is 17.25"x39". It's oil on panel.
Here's what's going on here from left to right:
1: Initial pencil drawing on panel.
2: Refined Pencil drawing; top white tabs are lightly painted. The drawing was fixed with Crystal Clear.
3: Initial color wash in for all yellow, the lighter yellow has been wiped off with a rag; first opaque detail layer.
4: Second layer of yellow for the dark side of the box. (Notice how much lighter the grey got when it was surrounded by this darker yellow. That was not repainted!)
5: More detail work; first opaque color for the light yellow side of the box. The letters will be painted back in again (too much trouble to cut all the bright yellow around all the letters-- we'll know better next time).
6: First layer of background color was cut in around the box (The color was chosen when the painting was designed).

More progress on the way!

Fun size

Welcome to Brett and Lana's blog. We each graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology last May, 2008 with BFAs in illustration and minors in art history.

Fun Size is our collaborative new series of work with a postmodern neo-pop spin. The blog serves as a record of our collaboration, which began in November 2008.