Ludwig van Bathoven, finished

Here's the finished painting of Ludwig van Bathoven, at last.

Most who knew Bathoven were familiar with his foul moods—but very few knew that his volatile outbursts
came from frustration at only being able to play two notes at a time.

With this piece, I didn't take any process images. . . because it was that kind of week.  I was busy getting used to Twitter (I'm @Brianliesbooks), and I was preparing for tomorrow's blog feature, the first guest blogger on Midweek Musings (come back tomorrow to see who it is!  Teaser:  she creates some of the funniest, quirkiest book characters I've met from below the Mason-Dixon line).  

OK, it wasn't all work.  I was also dealing with the loss of a 20-year-old dishwasher and haunting Craigslist for a drum kit.

For this painting, I began with my traditional burnt sienna and burnt umber underpainting (seen here in the piano bench).  Looking at my rough sketch, I decided I wanted to keep it very tonal with Ludwig's scarf/ascot appearing as the strongest color in the piece.  I also wanted to emphasize the pathetic nature of a pianist /composer playing with his thumbs, and the absolute black of the wing-bones creates a nice contrast against the sheet music to do that.  I also added one of Ludwig's feet in the final painting— the poor guy can't touch the piano's pedals, either.

"Finish Friday:" It's Vasco da Pollo.

So, it's Friday, and here's the intrepid explorer, Vasco da Pollo.  I like how he turned out.

It's funny how the mind brings up ideas when you're not expecting it to—as I worked on the finish for this bird, it occurred to me that the best chicken explorer name of all (see "Vasco da Llama," in my last post) would have been. . . Marco Pollo.

But I was already underway with this sketch, and with a color scheme in mind, and so I continued.  Maybe farther down the line, Marco Pollo will appear as one of these pieces.

I was interested in doing a very tonal background, with the suggestion of a city, as you often see in early paintings or prints.  If this were for a book, I'd have taken the time to do the research on a city in India which da Gama might have visited, and shown that city as the background.  Here, I just suggested the buildings.

I also remembered that da Gama was Portuguese, not Spanish, so the motto on his sash now reads:  Proteger a carne branca (see the previous post for more on this).

As with the last piece I did for this blog, this original painting of Vasco da Pollo was auctioned on eBay.

Here are some process images for this piece:

1) roughing in color washes in acrylic over the sketch on paper.  In this case, I printed out a copy of the sketch, glued it onto Strathmore 500 Series board, and painted directly on the printout.

2)  More tones coming in.

 3)  Closeup of his head.  At this point, I was happy with how his comb was popping against the background tone.  You can see I've laid in some tones in the eye to give it a little dimension and personality.

 4)  Background complete.  Trying to keep it a suggestion, rather than a tight rendering.  It's there for "flavoring" only.

5)  Finally, work on rendering Vasco da Pollo.