ardenstone

Week #3:

The canvas is gessoed, so now it’s all white:

Then we finally get to some color as Christy adds the first layer of paint. She uses oil paints, which have some neat colors and textures.

And by the end of her painting session, you can see she’s already painted the basis for most of the portrait. Since we’ve come to the interesting part, I’m upping the size of the photos. As always, click on them for higher resolution:

Can we guess the subject? Christy and I ended up decided to do this project (documenting the painting step-by-step) before she’d decided what her next painting was going to be about, so this was kind of a fun coincidence. I’m always fascinated by watching her paintings and other art progress. Each stage is full of interesting details, and the process of a whole is fun to watch.

After the initial disappointment in the frame, Christy decided to add her own, un-gessoed canvas to the frame. I lent her a hand to stretch and staple it (mmmmm, staple gun) on.

As you can see, we’ve gone from maybe two dozen staples total to more than two dozen per side. The canvas is stretched much more tightly and attached much more firmly in this version.

It really is stretched pretty tight, which is kind of fun to drum on. Flipping it over we see a new beginning! A blank canvas she’ll actually use:

That’s it for this week. While there has been a request for me to model in a sequined dress, it was decided that unimaginable horror did not need to be added to this blog. You can thank me later for preserving your sanity. Next week things get more exciting and color is actually added!

Ok folks, time for a new tradition! Because this blog isn’t schizophrenic enough, I’m adding a whole new feature: a weekly picture from Christy’s latest project. We’ve been talking about this for a little while, and she just started a new painting so the timing seemed good. As a special bonus, there are two pictures this week!

The first picture is the canvas. She bought this Artist & Craftsman Supply a few weeks back. Unfortunately they only carry one brand of stretched canvas (Apollon) and it just didn’t look that great. Still, Christy had some extra canvas hanging around, so if it wasn’t great quality at least she could use the frame.

The pictures are on flickr, so click on them for a larger version.

Here’s the newly purchased stretched canvas on her aisle:

You may not be surprised to learn that Apollon stretched canvases are, upon closer inspection, not that great. Christy uses oil paints and the canvas was only attached with a few (twenty? that’s not much for an 18″x18″ canvas) staples, so she was worried it would sag. Combined with her inherent distrust of pre-gessoed (basically primed) canvases, and she decided to toss the canvas and stretch and attach her own canvas on the frame. So here’s the second picture, the frame:

The pictures will get more exciting, but we’re going to start slow.