Day One!!!

     It's finally here! It was absolutely not my plan to procrastinate on my first day but I think the sun would have fallen right out of the sky if I had gotten started on a project on time. We don't want to disturb the natural order of things right out the gate.  So I got started at about 8pm which is fine because I actually needed the sun to go down before I really got to business today and that's only sort of an excuse.  See, my "studio" is not really ideal for art making, there's very little control over how much sunlight I get in here so if I'm doing something that requires dark, well, I have to wait till it gets dark!
     My first project is just your average portrait, with a little twist. No reason to get too fancy too soon, I need a few projects that will allow me to knock the rust off a bit.  The story behind this piece is that one of my most awesome cousins got married to her equally awesome new husband back in august.  My wife was invited to the bachelorette  party and was treated to some much needed gal time and when the big day came, the ceremony was gorgeous and the reception a blast (that side of the family is Irish Catholic so you KNOW it got more than a little rowdy) The tragic part is that my wife and I were moving that very week and didn't have money for a wedding gift.  Cousin Libby, being a class act, still sent us a thank you card for just attending.  I have planned ever since that I would make sure to get them something special when the time arrived that I had some dough to make that happen. The longer I waited, the cooler I felt like it needed to be and I have also been broke as a joke.  So, I have decided to paint their save the date card photo and give them a one of a kind original. This feels like just the right amount of unique and specialness. (disagreers can kindly eat one)

     

Here is the adorable photo in question:     

 
    Now the reason I needed it dark is that I am using an opaque projector to enlarge the photo.  I have a device known as an Art-o-graph and it takes the small photo and projects it up on your paper/canvas and you just trace what you need.  I know many of you might think this is cheating but I was trained as an illustrator, not a fine artist and we were taught that if there is a way to produce faster, better results then to hell with purism.  I could probably draw this out freehand and it might turn out nearly as accurate, but people buying art usually don't care if this was a labor of love and I took extra time to draw it all out. (and I can charge less for paintings that only took a fraction of the time so I'm sure any buyers would appreciate that!) I'm on a time table here and I want to get down to the painting part already.  The initial drawing is only a small part of the painting process, the viewer only really notices the background drawing if its wrong and if you start off with a weak drawing, well, its a little giving someone a jewel encrusted poo for their wedding, they might recognize that the jewel work is great, but a poo is still a poo.
      I mentioned earlier that there'd be a twist: Luke and Libby's invites and thank yous had these really elegant floral silhouette designs on them, there is probably an actual name for this design element and any design majors reading can feel free to let me know in the comment section but here is what that looked like:

     So my idea was to include these in the portrait.

This is what my "studio" looks like and on the left there you can just see the lens to the Art-O-Graph

Here's the actual tracing process, its not as easy as it sounds, your darn hand blocks the light pretty frequently and you have to do some amateur yoga to get it out of the way so you can find your line again - Man, my hairy sasquatch arm is really prominent in low light.

     When preparing for a painting this way, it's kinda nice to map out some of your gradient edges and blocks of light and shadow that wouldn't normally appear in a line drawing, just to offer that little bit more road map when you apply your paint.

I've highlighted the lines I'm talking about in red on this close up of the groom.  These aren't lines that separate two objects in space and he isn't one of those dudes who has a map of europe shaved into his dome. These are blocks of light and color in the photo that I'd like to get a vague shape of while I have the full size image in from of me 

The final drawing looks like this:

This is on Arches 400 lb rough watercolor paper (the last of my stash of this great paper from my college days) and it is bright white but I had a hard time adjusting the photo enough to get all the lines to show and not have it turn this manilla color, but it gives you the idea.

The next step is to mask off the parts I want to be white or want to preserve until after the initial paint is dry.  This is going to have to be tomorrow though because I may fall asleep on my keyboard any minute now. g'night.