14-Day Beginner Series - Putting It All Together

Hi, I'm Mackenzie Swenson, and welcome to the final day of the 14-day beginner series with Artist's Academy. So today we are going to kind of put everything together that we've learned, and I'm gonna show you what can go into creating a final piece of art. So I am actually going to give you all a little insider peel into a painting that doesn't even exist yet, that I've been working on for a while, and just show you how I've used a lot of these different things we've been talking about to kind of put together and create a painting that I really would like to exist, that I wanna make. And so I'm just gonna walk you through some of the things that have gone into that process so far, before I've even stretched the canvas for the final painting. And just a little note on that. One of the things that's really fun about using a process that does involve a lot of preparatory studies and sub-components, is that a lot of those pieces actually end up being fun images in their own right. So I actually have a lot of paintings where I've followed the more basic structure that I mentioned, with that still life I showed you guys earlier, where it's just do the drawing, do the study, do the final painting, and where I've actually sold both the preparatory drawing and the little study, or, you know I really cherish that little study because it's its own little painting. So, you know, just keep an open mind to the the different parts of the process and how you can really enjoy and kind of relax into all of the building blocks that lead to a final painting. So, first thing I'm gonna show you guys is the original little study that I used, thinking about this image. And I don't have a for-sure name for this even, yet. I've always just sort of referred to it for myself as a curiosity, so I'm gonna use that here. So this little study for "Curiosity" was the first image that I came up with just to kind of map out an idea, and it's actually the third in a series of images. So there's a little bit of a story to it, but you can see I'm using this gray paper, and the combination of the tone of the gray, the value of the graphite, and then the light of the white chalk to create this little study, and to really, you know, map out both where the boundaries of the different drawing shapes are, and then also where those value, big value patterns and patches are. So that was the first thing that I did. And then the next thing was to take that sketch and do a much larger drawing, and so for that drawing, you can see this image here, and so I wanted something that would be a little closer to the size of the final painting, which would probably be a little bigger. Bigger than this, but not too much bigger. And there's some really cruddy parts of this painting, like if you zoom into the dude's face, it's kind of wretched. So you don't actually have to do that. But you know, with the study, I'm like, okay, that I don't love. I really like how her face and body turned out. I like this, I like this. You can't win. 'em all. I'll fix it in the final painting. So this is that toned artistical Fabriano paper that I mentioned, and what I did is I kind of used my my sketch to map out a lot of these landscape elements and used a variety of things, random photos I found online, studies I had done from different places to kind of create the landscape elements here. And then it's a combination of big, broad ink washes, pencil, charcoal, more ink washes, white chalk, gouache. I don't even remember everything that's on here. It was just a mishmash of different, kind of different mostly dry mediums, but also the ink wash and the gouache, which are, they're all water based, but they're wet mediums. So in addition to that, I actually did studies of each of these individual figures, and so this was kind of inspiration to, there's a footprint on there. This is... These are clearly well taken care of, but this was a figure kind of loosely based on a painting that I really love by an artist named Abbott Henderson Thayer, and then this was kind of loosely based on a little statue that was just kind of around the studio, that I was like, "Oh, I like how that's posed." So I just draped some fabric on her, and, you know, used that as a reference. And you can see these are two different sizes, too, right? So then I've got this. I don't even remember where I got... I think I just looked at something, you know, an image online. His head is really big, but that's okay. And then here, I actually had a friend pose for me, and so then I used that to, you know, generally base this pose off of. And then this was a kind of separate study. So I drew this bigger, and then I had this, and what I ended up doing was I actually photographed them down to smaller sizes, and when this was in its really early stages, I literally just played like paper dolls almost and got all of these images down to the right size, and then I used a graphite transfer method to transfer all of those images onto this piece of paper, and then continued to progress the drawing as a whole from there. So it was a really fun way to use doing separate studies, a variety of inspiration and reference material, and then also the, yeah, just that transferring method to kind of achieve the image that I wanted. And so then after that, I scanned this at a copy shop, and got a shrunken-down version of it. So you can see this here. So this is just a scanned and then shrunken version of that same image, right? And I had a few copies of it. So one of them, I used to transfer the drawing, right, onto this little piece of Clausens canvas, and I started a little color study that would ideally then guide the final painting. So this still probably needs another layer to fully get worked out, but starting to play around with the colors and, you know, just the the value balance, neutrality versus moments of chroma, how to kind of lead the eye and place things at interesting parts for design purposes. And then, you know, big form, small form, creating big, beautiful areas of, you know, like a a nice overall composition that's eye catching from across the room, but then nice little moments of interest. So I'll start to play with that both with the color study and with the larger drawing. So those are just a couple of ways that I use the variety of things that we've talked about over the last two weeks in my own practice, and it's amazing what you have available to you when you kind of know how to navigate the waters of the multitude of options available within the art world. So that being said, it's been really fun to kind of go on this artistic journey with you guys over the last couple weeks, and I hope that you join us here at Artist's Academy. We've got lots of fun material that we're gonna continue to be loading the site up with, and it just feels really good to be part of an arts community where we can all create together. So thank you again so much for joining me, and look forward to seeing you next time.