Beginnings in Realism

My whole goal when I started painting was to move past my comfort zone of grey realism and into something more expressive than scientific. When I was a kid, my art was judged solely on how much it looked like the thing I was drawing. I had a math-is-power parent who never caught on that mathematics aren’t always so strict. So I drew a lot of things like this:

First Journeys into Colour

When I added colour into the mix, I went to coloured pencils, and pastels. I’d learnt oil painting as a child, so I tried that often, but no matter where I went, everything ended up being either bright or monochrome and dull, and I thought that if I couldn’t do realism, I wasn’t doing ‘real’ art.

The art that I’ve been making the last couple of years has been a way to try and find a style of my own, and to draw my own characters rather than the famous faces I spent so many decades trying to copy. I’ve been trying to use how to *use* colour, rather than apply it, and I think I am improving! The journey has been amazing.

Falling into the Same Traps But Without the Realism Payoff

I still catch myself skewing towards ‘realism,’ especially when I pick up anything that comes in pencil form. But, I’m not drawing from a famous photograph, I’m usually completely making everything up. This is oftentimes going too far in the opposite direction! I do better if I reference lighting and poses at the very least, even if the features and environment are of my own creation. These drawings of Mort below, for example, were done in graphite. The second I got a pencil in my hand, I thought ‘realism.’ But, there is no reference, there is nothing to copy, this is entirely from my head. Of course it doesn’t look as realistic as the portraits of Noel Gallagher or Peter Doherty, I was making it up as I went!

So then I find myself going very deep into the sketching phase. Taking a pencil sketch from a sketchbook, photographing it into Procreate, and then liquifying it again and again and again until I’m mostly satisfied. Then I transfer the fixed lineart onto my substrate and often get stuck filling in the geometry rather than the humanity.

This is a good example of that, I think:

I used references of fabric to plot out every single fold of the shirts before I even started painting. Personally, I like the way it looks with that detail, but I want to loosen up even further. I want to break my reliance on over-plotting so I can be trusted to plot responsibly and focus even more on colour relationships (and backgrounds, I really need to work on those). I already know how to draw a face, I want to illustrate.

Sketching Without a Pencil

Sketching is still important, though, for composing and keeping things consistent, most of all, but I’m trying to sketch with paint rather than with a pencil. First step was to attempt quick sketching with something I couldn’t erase. The goal was to be quick, not worry so much about details, and just get the feel for where colours should be. I have shamefully disliked these paintings, because I could only see “oh I made Sasha too big in the frame,” “Mort’s nose is too wide,” and “Jon’s eyes are too close together.” But there are so many things I did right! I used only a soft brush, to keep myself from detailling, I mixed in different hues into different areas of the face, and I started broad: face shape, eye shadows, nose, mouth, high points.

My next step, however, is to sketch with the paint. Only using a brush for a painting, from start to finish. I have done this before in my life, and have practised it from references when I was learning oil painting, but for this breaking of tradition, I just painted a man I made up strictly from my imagination, and a thin line sketch on a separate piece of paper. Rhys:

I worked quickly, I worked without a single pencil line, and the only crime I can find is that it’s rather a boring portrait, but that’s okay! I used purple undertones, and yellow highlights, and managed to make him look pale without looking dead. There’s chroma in the white of the shirt! Nothing but the glints in the eyes is pure white. I’m proud of it, I’m going to carry on with this sort of practice regularly. My confidence is already so improved that I’m not even ashamed to share these four examples here.