Tea Cup

Here is the final image to our most time intensive image! I painted the saucer on this thing twice, seeing as how this painting is 4 feet across that is a lot of work...pheww. Although we had good reference, we wound up doing a lot of the rendering based on how we thought it should look rather then how it looked, so at times it was a little confusing. Despite the ups and downs we are pretty happy with the way it came out. The color is very deep and reflective and that is quite wonderful.

4' x 3'
oil on MDF

Tea Cup

Last week Lana and I officially finished all painting on the teacup piece. In the end it will probably be the one that took the most work. Some of our techniques didn't work out as we imagined they would and complicated areas like the saucer had to be repainted twice. Over all we are both happy with the end result and most importantly we each learned a great deal about working on a large scale and painting in general. It still may need another coat of the feldspar green on the background, and it def. needs spray kammar varnish to unify the shiny surface. When the varnish dries we will photograph the 4' x 3' hulk and upload it, for now here is a detail shot.

Stick it to the buttcup

I put a dent in some of the work on the teacup, painting some wet into wet on some of the rims and handle. Blargh! Also, prior to this, I did the whole inside of the cup.
The blue in the saucer has been glazed in by Brett but will require more work... much like painting back into the bon-bon's red glaze.

This blue glaze was bad. It was like being in a hospital and your patient goes into cardiac arrest or some crazy shock and you have about 1 second to rig up some crazy way to jump start his heart again... ANYWAYS, in case anyone EVER needs to know this, I shall explain:

The blue glaze took two attempts. The first was liquin, in hopes of making it dry much faster. That failed since that would not become smooth (brush strokes). The alkyd type mediums have a tendancy to layer on themselves... creating an uneven covering (that is unless you are glazing like a 2 x 2 " area..)

The second was going to be lindseed oil but since that didn't stick to the too-dried grisaille by this time, we used a combo of liquin and lindseed oil. Well, we had to sacrifice.... there were brush strokes... But then we almost dropped dead because it was dry the next morning.

One way, or another....

...I'm going to drag this painting to the finish...kicking and screaming.

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.

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....