Lewis Hamilton – Day 1
I have a four days off work in a row so it’s a good time to get stuck into the painting of Lewis Hamilton in Australia 2008 that I have been planning.
It’s on hardboard, prepared with white gesso. The gesso is a thick undercoat that stops my oil paint from sinking into the hardboard. It also creates some texture formed by the brushstrokes when I applied it. The size is 12×9 inches.
Normally I cover the entire canvas in a medium tone to get rid of the harsh white undercoat. However I often find that if the final design has a lot of very light areas, I struggle to get back to a light enough tone and I end up with a lot of muddy light grey tones instead of an assertive separation of tones. I designed this painting with three tones, what we might call light, medium and dark and I want to keep the separation more than in my last painting.
Therefore this time I decided to experiment and leave the white canvas for now in the areas that will be light in the final painting. I have also foregone my usual method of doing a drawing in thin paint and I’ve gone straight into blocking in the medium tone areas in the bluish-grey mid-tone, and then the dark tone areas.
By the way, the medium tone blob you see top centre is just a shadow from my easel.
As usual I find myself experimenting in this painting. I think it’s important to experiment often, otherwise how do you learn anything? It involves a bit of risk, things might go wrong, but after all what is at stake? Not much, a bit of paint and canvas. If it goes wrong, all that’s happened is that I’ve exchanged paint, canvas and time for understanding. Rule 5: you don’t fully understand how to do a thing until you have made all the mistakes.
The bright red Vodafone front wing and rear wing are and important part of the design. The plan is to make these the same mid-tone as the road and the background, so I have dropped them in early on and will check they are the correct tone when viewed in greyscale. The next thing to do is to drop Lewis’ yellow helmet in there for the same reason.
Everything is still very rough at this stage, that’s fine. I’m just trying to get things in about the right place, about the right tone and hue, and keep the brushstrokes expressive. I’m going to be diving in to the details with a smaller brush later on anyway so there’s no reason to get too anxious about it yet.
Here’s a quick check that the bright red wings and the blue grey background are in fact the same tone. I’ve simply desaturated the previous photo in my favourite photo editing software.
