Tag Archives: a life sized mixed media self portrait

A piece of me #62, mixed technique over pastiglia on panel, 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

A Piece of Me #62, the mixed technique

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Fourth in the mixed technique series of the larger mixed media project. (You can read more about the mixed technique but clicking the category link on the right.) It’s consistently amazing to me how quickly these images come together – but only because I have spent months preparing the earlier layers. So this is a sustained argument for the power, saturation and luminosity attainable through an indirect technique.

A piece of me #62, mixed technique over pastiglia on panel, 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

A piece of me #62, mixed technique over pastiglia on panel, 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

A piece of me #62, egg tempera underpainting.

A piece of me #62, egg tempera underpainting.

This particular panel was fun because it was lightly sculpted using pastiglia and because compositionally it contained the top edge of one of my shoes. That created not only a different texture but also a stronger warmer hue inn addition to a set of stronger values. Here on the right then is an image of the egg tempera underpainting and the left the final achieved through one layer of oil.

Write up on the mixed technique here.

A piece of me #32, mixed technique on panel over collage, final version, 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

A Piece of Me #32, the mixed technique

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Third in the mixed technique series (see the category link on the right for a fuller description of the mixed technique). Here, compositionally, I am still navigating within the abstract flooring pieces of the larger composition. The plan for this panel called for a collage. Thus, in the very early stages I glued a number of pieces of fabric to the bare panel, roughly imitating the compositional planes to come. Doing so resulted in a very coarsely textured substrate and covering this with 9 layers of gesso never completely eliminated this coarseness. Yet elimination was never the idea for this project. My idea has always been to live with whatever the process created and still try to create something beautiful from it.

A piece of Me #32, egg tempera underpainting

A piece of Me #32, egg tempera underpainting

A piece of me #32, mixed technique over collage, 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

A piece of me #32, mixed technique over collage, 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

So the image here on the right displays the egg tempera underpainting (over the collage) stage. Overall it’s light in value while the hue differences between the tiled planes have been accentuated. The image on the left shows the panel after one working session in oil. Due to my gray unifying glaze, the heavy texture of the collage caused the broad fields to look very dirty. Couldn’t live with that! So, I decided to do one more working session in order to reclaim the beauty of these subtly modulated fields. The spotlighted image above illustrates the difference. BTW: if you’re reading this via email, the wordpress interface doesn’t include the enlarged “spotlighted” image at the top, so (if you are interested to do so) you’ll need to use the link to compare these three stages.

Write up on the mixed technique here.

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A Piece of Me #57, the mixed technique on panel, 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

A Piece of Me #57, the mixed technique

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A Piece of Me #57, the mixed technique on panel, 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

A Piece of Me #57, the mixed technique on panel, 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

A Piece of Me #57, egg tempera on panel, 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

A Piece of Me #57, egg tempera underpainting on panel, 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

Here is the second of the mixed technique series (see the category description on the right for a full explanation of the technique). Like #47 before it, this one is another abstract design principally of the tile flooring in front of the great mosque at Casablanca. You can read about the concept behind the whole project here.

To the right you can view the egg tempera underpainting before its layer of oil. To the left the completed panel afterwards. Once again, the increase in saturation and depth seems to happen almost automatically – due to the difference in medium. Additionally, what’s interesting to me, is that I had completed the underpainting a few months back, imagining it to be a final piece (and not just the groundwork for further manipulations in paint). That is, I thought I was creating a finished panel for the egg tempera series – and at the time I was pretty happy with the result. I think the composition lends itself to that satisfaction, but still after I discovered the error, I was curious about how much the oil level could or would enhance the piece. I think it does. What do you think?

Write up on the mixed technique here.

A Pice of Me #47, the mixed technique on panel, 21 x 13.3 or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

A Piece of Me #47, the mixed technique

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After a long hiatus I was finally able to get back to the studio yesterday. Hooray!! This piece marks the beginning of the upcoming “mixed technique” series. For a full description of the mixed technique see the category description to the right.

A Pice of Me #47, egg tempera underpainting

A Pice of Me #47, the egg tempera underpainting

A Pice of Me #47, the mixed technique on panel, 21 x 13.3 or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

A Pice of Me #47, the mixed technique on panel, 21 x 13.3 or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

So on the right you can see the preparatory work consisting of an egg tempera underpainting developed over an india ink underdrawing (no image of the B/W phase). On the left you can see the final panel after a session of maybe an hour or two, working oils into its underpainting. Saturation and contrast/depth is quickly achieved – but only because the groundwork has already been developed. I remember the words of James Brown: “Now brother don’t leave your homework undone”. Viewing the results of the oil though, It’s easy to understand why their discovery in the fifteenth century was such a revolution.

I’m thinking that this speed of image development will most likely be true for all the “abstract” panels of this project (see link for a full description). The figurative panels will, most likely, require more time, thus more working sessions. But we’ll see. Onward and upwards!

Write up on the mixed technique here.

A Piece of Me #26, egg tempera on panel. 21 x 13.3 cm or 5 1/4 x 8 1/4 in.

A Piece of Me #26, egg tempera

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A Piece of Me #26, egg tempera on panel. 21 x 13.3 cm or 5 1/4 x 8 1/4 in.

A Piece of Me #26, egg tempera on panel. 21 x 13.3 cm or 5 1/4 x 8 1/4 in.

Finally, the last in the egg tempera series. A fore-ground composition full of meaningful, three dimensional human form containing a full range of values: strong contrasts of light and dark. Rendering the flesh tones of the hand and the warm glinting light of the gold bracelet were wonderful challenges. A Renaissance painter would have applied real gold leaf(!) – to the bracelet, that is..

After completing this panel last November I returned to this panel after it cured. I wanted to intensify the saturation of the main shapes of the pants leg and the green sweater with more coats of glaze. I warmed up the hand too. But it’s also important to keep in mind that egg tempera, in contrast to the other media  of this project (that is, oil, encaustic and acrylic) requires a final coat of protective varnish. This varnish will darken all values by about 10%, so I don’t mind leaving these panels a little bit lighter than their companions. Compositionally and chromatically I’m not trying for seamless alignments but at the same time the values should more or less align.

A technical write up here of the lessons learned about egg tempera in this series of panels.

A Piece of Me #31, egg tempera over linen on panel. 21 x 13.3 cm or 5 1/4 x 8 1/4 in.

A Piece of Me #31, egg tempera

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A Piece of Me #31, egg tempera over linen on panel. 21 x 13.3 cm or 5 1/4 x 8 1/4 in.

A Piece of Me #31, egg tempera over linen on panel. 21 x 13.3 cm or 5 1/4 x 8 1/4 in.

A panel of abstract geometric shapes – diagonal trapezoids except for one lonely cigarette butt lower left. Deceptively easy. Create a few washes and that’s it. But no, there were cool tiles, there were warm tiles, there were neutral tiles. How to create an interesting unity of these subtle contrasts of hue? Then also, how to emphasize the extremely reduced value range – inherent to the original subject – so that this panel, too, is interesting by itself? This is the result. I’ll take it.

Note to self: this was an egg tempera over linen panel. I am slowly finding by experience that the linen is not a good addition on a substrate for egg tempera. It affects the absorbency in a negative way and influences the brushwork in a negative way, too. For oils that is the opposite. For the next time, perhaps a very fine linen weave might be OK, but not a coarse one.

Write up of the overall project here.

A technical write up of the lessons learned about egg tempera in this series of panels.

A piece of me #16, egg tempera over collage. 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

A Piece of Me #16, egg tempera

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A piece of me #16, egg tempera over collage. 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

A piece of me #16, egg tempera over collage. 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

This is one of the more interesting spontaneous compositions of the overall project. When I first saw it, I wasn’t sure what the long haired girl was doing. Then it hit me, of course, she’s taking a selfie! How 21st century.

The dice-roll treatment for this panel stipulated collage and egg tempera. These are two elements that are almost antithetical to one another. Collage is coarse and heavily textured. Egg tempera is quite refined, subtle and also accentuates any irregularities in the substrate. Thus I anticipated that this one would be challenging. But in fact, as I began laying in colors and calibrating value relationships, the coarseness of the collage didn’t create too many problems, au contraire, it actually enhanced the design (for the most part), which of course is what I had wanted (but couldn’t expect).

Another aspect of the composition is the way it reads as landscape. There are clear foreground, middle ground and background elements. That meant that I needed to modulate my values in such a way to enhance the “landscape” experience. So, given all the givens – of a very contemporary subject mattered panel –  I’m pleased with the way it turned out.

A technical write up of the lessons learned about egg tempera in this series of panels.

A piece of me #61, egg tempera on panel. 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

A Piece of Me #61, egg tempera

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A piece of me #61, underdrawing in india ink

A piece of me #61, underdrawing in india ink

A piece of me #61, egg tempera on panel. 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

A piece of me #61, egg tempera on panel. 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

Saturated shoes! I had almost given up on this panel because I was having a difficult time getting a warm saturated tonality. So I had put it aside for awhile to let the previous work cure, hoping the surface would be more receptive after a few days. Today I laid on a couple of washes in venetian red, which is a very warm and saturated pigment, and the shoes began to dance! Literally. Well OK, the inspiration could have been Tina Turner on my iTunes but still, I swear I saw them dance.

The black and white underdrawing on the right, the fully colored developed painting on the left. A full overview description of the whole project is here. A technical write up of the lessons learned about egg tempera in this series of panels here.

A Piece of Me #11, egg tempera on panel, 21 x 13.3 cm or 5 1/4 x 8 1/4 in.

A Piece of Me #11, egg tempera

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A Piece of Me #11, underdrawing in india ink

A Piece of Me #11, underdrawing in india ink

A Piece of Me #11, egg tempera on panel, 21 x 13.3 cm or 5 1/4 x 8 1/4 in.

A Piece of Me #11, egg tempera on panel, 21 x 13.3 cm or 5 1/4 x 8 1/4 in.

This was one of the more, if not most, complex compositions so far. It was both a surprise and a challenge to do since it contained so many figures – and parts of figures. But because of my approach on this project I do not (for the most part) design the composition, rather, I design the approach (and even aspects of that are still luck of the draw). As it turns out, egg tempera on a flat substrate is perfect for such detail.

Interestingly enough though, the composition also contains the components of a traditional landscape. In this case, the edge of my shoulder appears in the foreground far right, along with the tip of a man’s hand in the far left. Then there’s the lady in the blue striped shirt, perhaps best considered still as foreground, though I was careful not to render her as fully saturated chromatically nor with a full value range. Then there’s the couple in the middle-ground, left. Finally, the array of receding figures. By my count about thirteen in all (!).

So I began with a fully developed black and white underdrawing in india ink, see right. This allowed me to proceed with the egg tempera level slowly and gently by laying in light washes to test for color relation and value development. I realized as I worked that it’s very similar to the process of colorizing old black and white photographs. Luckily, most of the clothing on the figures in the background was (cool) blue, which works well for reading distance, so I kept with that. But I also decided to keep a few of the warm background colors in some of the other figures too, although in extremely light washes. These washes helped to provide a chromatic unity to the warm flesh tones of the foreground.

Like the previous panel this, too, was delectable to colorize. I’m happy and hoping to wind up the egg tempera series soon. A technical write up of the lessons learned about egg tempera in this series of panels here.

A Piece of Me #1, egg tempera on panel, 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

A Piece of Me #1, egg tempera

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A Piece of Me #1, underdrawing in india ink.

A Piece of Me #1, underdrawing in india ink.

A Piece of Me #1, egg tempera on panel, 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

A Piece of Me #1, egg tempera on panel, 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

A piece of a man’s head with a hat. An evocative untold story? Or no story at all: just this. The weave of the hat was an absolute delight to render, both in the india ink stage on the right as well as the egg tempera on the left. The black and white preliminary drawing then, allowed it to come alive with a light wash of terre verte followed by another light wash of yellow ochre. Fun too, was the supporting neck with its soft fuzzy hairline. The neck, underpainted with terre verte, provided a warm contrast to the cool hat above and the cool shirt/sweater combo below. The perceptive effects of color are always relational. And off in the distance the arabesque details of the Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca beckon.

You can read a description of the full project here. A technical write up of the lessons learned about egg tempera in this series of panels here.