Good dog!
Joey is still just a puppy, but he taught an old dog (me!) some new tricks.
This is Joey in his natural state: chewing on something. Though I foresaw some issues with including the bone in my painting, I felt it was too important to Joey’s personality to leave it out.
I knew the bag was going to be in blues, greens, and blacks, so I started out in that vein.
From the beginning, the bone looked a little strange.
It made Joey look like a saber-toothed Cocker Spaniel!
But the chew-toy wasn’t the only—or, ultimately, the main—problem.
Joey’s deep velvety coloring makes him difficult enough to photograph…
...and those difficulties translated directly to paint!
I was forever losing the structure of Joey in the saturated darks. Here, I tried to go in with some white lines to define him again…
...and, here, I went in stronger still, trying to force structure on an image that had lost it entirely.
It was around this time that I figured out that my usual blacks—fluid combinations of burnt umber and phthalo blue—weren’t going to cut it. I rarely use tube black and I didn’t want to do so here, but the gloss finish of the phthalo blue was making it very difficult to integrate the whole painting.
The glare of the deep blacks (under Joey’s chin for example) may not be not that obvious in a still shot like this, but I knew that, as a functional item always seen from a variety of changing angles, a You Bag with an inconsistent finish wouldn’t cut it.
Unsure of what to do about that issue, I instead focused on the bone problem by painting it out.
I hoped I could make Joey’s mouth look natural even without his plastic toy to give it that open shape.
In the mean time, all my false starts had built up a lot of paint on the surface of the bag and made it stiffer than it should be for maximum stuff-ability. I took some sandpaper to it…
..and tried to make it work without the bone.
Here, I finally stumbled onto a solution for the deep coloring by introducing a new pigment into the painting: ultramarine blue.
By mixing the ultramarine with the phthalo and the burnt umber, I came up with a rich black that didn’t produce a sheen.
Another restructuring of the face—a last ditch attempt at making it work without the bone.
The home stretch.
Gwenn Seemel
Joey
2009
acrylic on canvas tote
15 x 19 x 5 inches
(detail below)
In the end, I’m very pleased that I managed to capture Joey with his bone: he’s a very chewy pup so it wouldn’t be right to leave it out! I’m pleased, too, that in the process, I learned to incorporate an unusual (for me) pigment in a new way.
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CATÉGORIES: - Practice - Process images - You Bag -
(2) Comments / Commentaires: Good dog!
Fantastic Art. I love your photos of the process. And you surely captured Joey’s personality
Megan...
I totally love it. He’s so cute and the bag captures it! xx
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