Valentino Rossi painting – Day 1
Today I started on a new painting, a picture of Valentino Rossi. I thought I would post photos of my progress as I go along. This feels like a bit of a risk, because the painting might not work!
I’ve already come up with a plan for the painting. On this occasion I worked up the plan digitally (in Krita). I’ve never planned a painting that way before, so we’ll see how it turns out. Here is the plan/sketch from Krita:
I’d been reading about how digital artists use lots of layers. By putting each colour on its own layer you can adjust all the colours in the plan individually, and also adjust the colour of the sunlight and the colour and strength of the shadows. The aerial perspective in the digital drawing is also caused by a layer, as is the soft focus blurring around the edges of the machine. I did work out lots of variations on the colour scheme of Yamaha blue and yellow and in the end I decided on this one. The drawing itself is a bit rough, but that’s OK, I learned what I needed to know from this study. The plan has a tonal structure, with the light coming in from the left, there’s a contiguous shadow from the bottom right, merging into the shadow side of the bike and rider and describing their form, with an interesting island of light peeking through underneath the bike.
However, I learned the lesson from my previous painting The Race, and thought a bit about what would be in the background early on. I printed out several copies of the digital sketch above and did some scribbles. The version below shows the background I’m planning to put into the final painting.
The background will show an S-bend with two other bikes coming through a little way behind Rossi. See how this transforms the picture into a scene – before it was just a portrait of Vale, now it’s a picture of Vale trying to escape the clutches of his pursuers. Much more dramatic.
On to the painting itself, which I started today.
I would like some of the background to poke through the final painting, and it would be great if that background was yellow, I think that might help to unify the colour scheme a bit. That’s a stronger background colour than I would normally choose, another reason this painting might not work! But I prefer taking a few risks, so let’s see what happens. The background wash is lemon yellow with a bit of cerulean blue. As you can see, I have also made an initial drawing with a small round brush in a darker tone. This drawing is just to get me started, it will quickly get covered over as you will see. I just want help to get my initial tones in the right place (in the next step), don’t want to have to make too many big corrections once the thicker paint is down.
I’ve started putting in the blue tones with a medium-sized flat brush. I’m thinking about being expressive with the brush strokes, not worrying too much about staying between the lines. And also I’m thinking about preserving the “form principle”, which means that the shadow sides of the bike & rider must be darker in tone than the lit side, regardless of the local colour. So the blue panel on the bike’s left flank should be noticeably darker than the lit side of the bike.
It is easy to get tones wrong at this stage, because you haven’t got all the tones in yet and that can throw off your attempts to judge the right colours. I’ve also thinned with turps the paint I mixed for the darker areas you can see above. That means it slides on the surface in an interesting way but it also dries a bit lighter. I need to go in again soon and darken the deep shadows so I can judge all the other tones a bit better.
It looks a bit weird at this stage. Remember Rule Number 3, Dan! “Don’t panic, stick to the plan”.
At this stage I’ve completed the initial bash at the bike itself. The contrast between the shadow side and the lit side isn’t strong enough yet, but let’s get on with putting the foreground and background in before we make any further judgements about that.
The background is in. It still looks a bit weird, there’s no structure, but let’s carry on.
Now the structure is there, almost – it needs to be improved I think, but it’s better and at least now we can make more confident judgments. There are no details and the details are the thing that you immediately notice in a finished painting, however one of the secrets is that the tonal structure is the most important part of the design, so I’m mostly concentrating on that at this stage. Note in the foreground that the part of the white kerb in the shadow should fall into the darker group of tones.
I think overall that mid-tones predominate too much. That blue panel on the shadow side is definitely too light, even though it will pick up some reflections from the kerb. Let’s take a look at the painting so far in greyscale.
It’s quite instructive to look at it like this. For a strong design, there needs to be a strong dark interesting shape against a lighter background and I don’t have that yet. Let’s take a look at it in just two tones.
At this level it should be clear what the object is. I think it’s not bad but needs some improvement. I’ll carry on with developing the structure and maybe start putting in some more subtle tones tomorrow.
