Part 4 – Rainy Day Dragon Painting
The Making of a (Not so) Tiny Dragon
This is part 4 and the final process post for the Rainy Day Dragon picture. If you’d like to see the steps I took to get to this point, here are links to the previous 3 posts
Using graphite paper, I transferred the drawing to an Ampersand Gessobord. For any painting, I like to have my color study next to me when I start. The goal isn’t to copy it exactly but use it to keep me on track with the color idea I chose. As I paint the colors become better described and nuanced. (Generally as I paint I just need a reminder of the chosen direction so I don’t get distracted with new ideas that might pop up. If an entertaining idea does pop up, and it’s better than what I started with, sometimes I’ll change it. Otherwise I just make note of the idea somewhere.)
I started the painting with oil paint thinned out a bit with odorless mineral spirits (Gamsol).
Following the “fat over lean” principle, as the painting progresses I used less solvent and more paint. I shaped the volumes and the planes, thinking about light flow, values, color temperature shift, and edges.
I also kept my frog reference on hand. There was a lot of helpful information about skin texture, value relationships, and color changes on the frog’s skin and the leaves. I love the cool color shift on the top of the leaf vs. the underside (see top left frog photo) and the color shift of the light areas of the frog vs. the shadow areas.
For the details and when I was refining edges I used an oil painting medium. It loosens up the paint while adding more “fat” to the layers and allows the paint to be manipulated for details.
And here’s the final painting.
Colors used:
- Permanent Green
- Viridian
- Winsor Yellow
- Light Red (kind of a rusty, brownish red)
- Napthol Scarlet
- Burnt Umber
- Transparent Brown Oxide
- Cobalt Blue
- Raw Sienna
- Raw Umber
- Flake White Hue (Winsor & Newton)
I hope to have prints available of this painting within the next month. If you’re interested please complete this email opt-in form and you will receive an email when prints are available for purchase.
The Rainy Day Dragon drawing was selected to be part of ArtOrder, LLC’s Tiny Dragons Art Project as one of the pictures in the Not So Tiny Dragons book. You can find more information about this fun Kickstarter here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/artorder/tiny-dragons-art-project.
And you can learn even more about the project on the Tiny Dragon website http://www.tinydragon.art/