Tree of Life - how a painting is born : bringing the painting to life

well, I must confess I am not being able to match the rhythm of the making of Tree of Life with my blogging. the painting is somewhat advanced now and on the blog it barely received the underpainting! so now let's try to catch up.

after the first underpainting I realize that the tree has no masculine elements, which is a very necessary thing to create life. first I think about drawing penises confounding with the branches, but I find that horns would be more symbolic and elegant. after all, they evoke the Horned God, which is very appropriate!


after spreading some long, curved horns around the branches, it's time to start filling them (branches) with pigment. I then start an underpainting with Payne's Grey.



underpainting done, it's time to have fun filling up the areas I had defined for my abstracts. however, most of the pencil is gone under the grey watercolor, and I create the abstracts intuitively with a second layer of Payne's Grey and drops of violet, yellow and pink in a wet on wet approach.


a very bad thing I use to do that I don't recommend anyone, at least you are very secure about what you are doing: experiments on your definitive support. here I use a small area of the background to test colors and shapes that will be used throughout the painting. I kind of like the general feel of it, although some shapes don't feel right, but that's easy to fix. I'm keeping true to my pallette of choice in order to keep things balanced. for the background I'm using Dioxazine Violet, Cadmium Orange Hue and a green I obtained mixing Viridian, Emerald Green and Alizarim Crimsom.


I apply a second wash of underpainting onto the background, using violet for the upper part, a mixture of blues for the middle and Cadmium yellow for the lower part. then I start doing the shadows in the branches, with different amounts of pigment and water - more pigment to the darker areas. I also enrich the abstracts this way.


and more inapropriate experimentation, this time in the middle part of the painting. I create quite a chaos buiding leaves, spirals and abstract leaves in the shape of triangles, and also enhancing the star points with outer shadows to enhance and "separate" them from the background. I don't like the result. some areas are too muddy and I hate the shape of the leaves, although the little triangle-leaves work well and do a nice contrast with the round shapes of the spirals. by the way, I must confess that I never got to make good leaves, or at least some I really find worthy. I definitely have to do some studies on leaves and find out a style I like.

I repeat the shapes I think that work on the other side (left). better to do some cleaning on the right side. at this point, here's how it looks like:


and after a little more layers of grey for shadow enhancement, the painting is finally coming to life. just recently I started to use Payne's Grey for the shades, and it works much better than black, for it's way more vivid and warm.

Ebay - goldmine for artists?

and then I decided to give Ebay a try, after a dozen stories of artists that take part of their incomes out of Ebay sales and the such. picked 2 watercolors on paper, Flourish and Totem #1, normally priced at $100, and set the starting bid price at $50, plus $20 for shipping and handling.

my sincere opinion is that the auctions won't be succeeded. I'm not a well known artist, and I don't have how to compete with several other paintings being offered by shameful prices like $10, $6,99 and even $0,99 - with free shipping. yes, people will bid and those prices will raise, but if there's no many offers and you have to send your piece away for $1 ?? and pay for the shipping? and pay for the Ebay fees? frankly, it does not sound to me a very clever way to make money.

I understand the effort that many artists (myself included) have been doing in order to make art more affordable and accessible to the general public. but for selling themselves for that low they are not only undervaluing them, they are also doing a deservice to the art community in general, something that is very close to the Walmart business model. if you really want to sell your art for such low prices, you need to produce a lot of art in order to meet your needs. you have to be almost an art machine. almost one step of making souless, empty works in order to attend the demand.

I don't know, but something tells me that Ebay auctions are not for me. anyway, I don't lose much in trying, who knows how the story unfolds...

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talking about sales, I'm seriously thinking about discontinuing the production of open edition prints. after my last sales I realized that it's a lot of work for not a very significant profit, what makes me think that letting RedBubble and Imagekind take care of all the dirty job might be a good decision.

Tree of Life - how a painting is born, part 4

now my sketch is pretty much ready to receive its first watercolor wash. so let's start with an underpainting on the background, which works very well to help me define a pallete for my piece. it's easy to get crazy with so many colors in front of you and wanting to experiment and mix and create a color extravaganza, but better take it easy. I try to limit my pallette the most possible so I won't get overwhelmed and get into more problems to solve.

this panel is all about life, fertility, joy. is intended to be "springy" and vivid, so I choose warm and jovial colors that will work as a basis for the work: dioxazine violet, rose madder and cadmium yellow. I start applying pure water on the area I want to fill, with just a little bit of pigment so I can see where the water is going. then I aplly each one of the three chosen colors freely with the bamboo brush and a flat brush, letting the pigments run with the water and mix.


this is how it looks like after the wash is done and still fresh (please forgive my lamp light reflecting on the wet surface.) I love to move the board while it's still wet and make the colors migrate across it and blend with the others, creating all kinds of dreamy effects.

now it's time to wash my dishes and grab a coffee and let the painting gets dry.

Tree of Life - how a painting is born, part 3

after several studies in my sketchbook, I finally got tired and decided to go for action. you can't waste a lot of time in studies, or you'll go nuts. to find the perfect images it's an illusion, for you'll evolve, change your tastes and style. if you spend too much time looking for perfection, you'll never complete a work. besides, the final result will never match exactly what you've planned. things go changing as long as the colors come; you add something here, you take something there, you'll never know what you are going to face when you go for the canvas or paper sheet adventure.

as I am doing a quasi "painting reality show" here, I thought that would be a good thing to talk a little about the materials I am using for this work. my support this time is the beloved illustration board.



that's what I use when I'm working on more complex stuff. my brand of choice is Crescent, which is an affordable good quality stuff. it's just perfect for the ones who use tons of pigment and hundreds of watercolor layers, which would deform any regular paper. another advantage: the board stands the most hardcore techniques, specially when you need to lift the pigment off after making a mistake or getting an unsatisfactory result and want to do it again.


on my side table I have Winsor & Newton watercolor tubes and pans, number 00 to 5 round brushes, flat brushes for washes and my precious Chinese bamboo brushes; two jars of clean water, pallete, pencils, mechanical pencils, stumps and different types of erasers; and my best friend, the paper towel.

I start adding new elements to the sketch...

... a fetus on the basis figure, right on the womb. the lower triangle vortex points right there - manifestation of the Divine in the physical plane. a spiral shapes the form of the womb and fetus - the golden spiral of the Sacred Geometry, symbol of the Cosmos harmony and precision. the womb is surrounded by a wide petals flower, which will possibly be a lotus, I still don't know. from the flower drops run down toward the ground - which I'll represent in one of the adittional panels, now named South panel, below this one, which is the central panel. a curious thing: I draw the drops without realizing that they are pointed downward, as if they are coming from the ground, and not the opposite, as they are supposed to be. that reminds me some images of the XVIII tarot arcane, The Moon, in which the Moon itself seems to be sucking drops out of the ground. since the South panel will bring a representation of the Moon, I have the impression that more stuff will arise from that!


... branches, leaves, abstractions, spirals, spirals.

now it's time to solve the problems that appeared since the work took a different direction. as I started to have different ideas when the main image had already been built on my definitive support, I have to make some adaptations ou I'll have to redo the drawing. but the thing reveals not as hard as I thought it would be.

problem 1 - composition of the six-pointed star. after several calculations the star ends up fitting well the work, although its sides are not that exact. but that's not a problem, since the difference is not so perceptible. to solve the visibility of the star, I decide to build the triangles that form it using spirals and flowers, giving to it an organic quality that harmonizes with the object (tree) and dispenses the mathematical precision. I think that in the picture below you can have an idea (I intensified the contrast to turn visible the lines that form the triangles, still too light. they are traced over the figures.)



problem 2 - placement of the triangles in the center of the picture. the star needs here to be more or less centralized, in order to bring balance to the composition. I can't do it without deforming the triangles; then, the solution I find is to eliminate one inch on the left of the painting. I stick some tape to delimit my working area. in order to do not have to get my board off the wooden one that works as a support, I decide that I'm going to cut the painting off after it's done, which is dangerous because if I make some mistake in the cut, bye bye painting. but since I've done that before with no problem at all, I am confident that everything will be alright this time also (gulp!)

extra tape stuck toward the right, marking one inch less on my working area.

the final touch before starting the watercolor is to age one of the women. I want to give to the figures that Triple Goddess character I've mentioned before - Maiden, Mother and Crone. I pick the one at the right, that since the beginning looks older than the others. it's curious how she is the only one who shows more of her own face.

the final work, before the watercolor:

the Zodiaque series - Scorpio

Watercolor and pencil on paper,
9 x 12
2009
$100