Disassembly (XIII.IV)

Exercise from oil painting DVD 13, section 4.

WIP
[link]
Process 1: [link]
Process 2: [link]

The limes pwned me. Still not sure what's making them look off--suggestions would be great.

There was a lot of emphasis in this lesson on making controlled, fluid, yet precisely shaped brushmarks that describe form and texture with a minimum of strokes. Very challenging to do digitally because one cannot see how (or which part of) the brush is "touching" the canvas.

Main Insights

1. Work from back to front, dark to light.


2. Soften edges of background elements and shadow-facing sides to maintain attention on focal point.


3. Very light or very dark surfaces reflect surrounding colour in strong light.


4. Avoid chalky whites by mixing in a little colour (e.g. highlights on limes are a warm white mixed from cadmium yellow light.)


5. Effect of softening and texturing by pushing paint with the tip of a brush (e.g. lime highlights) can be approximated using Wet Oily Palette Knife to make feather-light flat strokes (outward for smearing at low opacity, inward to create texture within the highlight) and flickering edge strokes.


6. It's very easy to lose stroke texture when painting digitally--avoid overworking an area. Lost texture can sometimes be remedied by painting over the top with the background colour using random strokes at low opacity (+/- increased Feature.)


7. Set Feature to 1 for dense-edged brush used in edging.


8. Settings for blended stroke on petal of standalone flower bulb:
         flat oils
         opacity: 51 (expression: pressure)
         resat: 20 (expression: pressure)
         bleed: 100 (expression: pressure)
         brush calibration enabled (v. scale 0, power 0.25, p. scale 0.63, p. power 4)
         angle: rotation
         damping: 0
         min size: 0 (expression: pressure)
         real bristle enabled (roundness 23, b. length 3, profile length 100, b. rigidity 50, fanning 3, friction + height 50)

Painter 12 ( Oils, Palette Knife, Blenders), Intuos 5 with art pen.