Monday, January 16, 2012

fishing king

oil on 18 x 24 canvas panel. first painting finished for the year 2012!! hope this becomes a more painting productive year than the last one and hopefully i get to make lots of obra maestras (master pieces) too.
i started debating whether to paint this kingfisher on a 16x20 or a 18x24 inch canvas. the 18x24 won because i had more canvases in this size in stock than the 16x20. although the original idea was to paint a life sized azure kingfisher which is approximately 6 to 8 inches tall. a bird of this size and in my composition would still look small on a 16x20 canvas. as you can see i went with a larger than life scale ratio instead.
if you look closely, i made some mistakes around the early stages of penciling. usually making penciling mistakes on canvas are irreparable because no matter how much eraser you use the pencil marks will never be gone so its better you not try to use an eraser at all. thankfully, it was only a minor error and i didn't need to prepare a new canvas for a fresh start so i just flipped the canvas upside down and started again.
this is also the first time im painting in a vertical format for my oil painting collection.

Picture 138

choosing the right background color went through quite a lot of color changes. at first i used a mixture of french ultramarine and thalo green but it turned out to be too light in shade so i chose payne's gray as a top coat. i was aiming for dim aquarium lighting so i needed a dark bluish green background. at this stage i also covered up most of penciling mistakes from earlier too.

Picture 139

i chose the dim aquarium lighting mood to highlight the kingfisher's decent into the water to catch its prey. adjusting the real color of the azure kingfisher with warm yellow lighting was a fun experiment.

Picture 140

with all the right color mixtures in place it was easy to paint the rest of the body. using cerulean blue, cobalt blue, permanent green light with titanium white painting the bubbles was easy.

Picture 144

Picture 146

choosing color for the caught fish was a bit tricky since this is an underwater scene with dim yellow lighting the fish scales would be bouncing all sorts of color. i thought it would be fun to portray the fish to be somewhat translucent and glowing.
the last time i painted stone texture was on my curious kitty painting. instead of using sponges for texture again i decided to use colors instead. unlike the curious kitty painting the stones in this composition was close up and i think the sponges would not be able to bring out the textures i have envisioned. i think i did alright starting with the top most stone on the left going to the right.

Picture 149

the last stages in my painting usually involves a lot of glazing to adjust the light and dark of color hues. finally finished.

n

1 comment:

  1. Beautiful! I was wondering how you did it!

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