My Process: 1 Spoon 2 Cones

It’s easier to show what I do than explain why I do it.  This post will take you through my working process, not why I choose to paint what I do. As to the latter issue, let’s just say I’m fascinated with hands and how looking at hands and how they are used can tell as much about an individual and about a culture as looking at the whole person or a whole society. Anyway this painting began with photographing at Artscape, Baltimore’s summer carnival.  When I began the middle phase of the Hands series in 2009, it was my first use of photographs as a sketching medium since the Parade series of 1995-6. Here are the two photographs that are the basis of 1 Spoon 2 Cones.

The first step is figuring out the scale of the painting. In this case the drawings are 1.5x the size of the photos. I plot just enough points so I can drawing simple outlines of the parts of the photos I want in the painting. I hope you can see this in the next set of images.

The next three pairs of images document how I build up pigment to create the flesh tones. First I establish the highlights. This is important because I use the white of the paper, not white paint, for the brightest highlights. I literally paint around these whites.

Then I establish the darks, starting with a deep sepia-red tone.

Finally I paint the midtones to unite the hightlights with the darks.

Lastly I paint the non-flesh parts of the images and then paint a thin wash to establish the rectangles that hold the two images. Click here to see 1 Spoon 2 Cones in the Latest Hands gallery.