The Design Process How to create an ENGAGING COMPOSITION

Hi there, how's it going? Andrew here and in this video we're going to talk about the design process and in particular taking some bad photographic reference and using that to come up with a good idea for a painting. We're going to do a bit of rough sketching and a little bit of rendering and then come up with a color study to inform the final painting. Let's get started. Now have you ever come across this situation where you've gone away to an inspiring location to collect reference material, bring that back to the studio only to discover that it's inadequate? Now I recently went away to Italy to collect some references and to do a little bit of research for some paintings that I really wanted to create. I saw some amazing scenes of Venice, Malfi and Florence but there was one area in particular that I wanted to get reference of that I just couldn't. For whatever reason, due to our schedule and due to where we were, I just couldn't get these rolling Tuscan landscapes that I really wanted to paint. So then I came up with the idea of inventing the scene entirely. Now as artists we can do that. So in this video I want to show you how you can take some unrelated reference material and here I'm going to be using a scene from far north Queensland being inspired by this rolling Australian landscape and add some Italian accents to it to create something new. We're being a little bit cheeky here but what we can do as artists is take these different worlds and bring them together to create something unique. Some of the most useful photographs that I found were shot out of the bus or the train window on our way from Florence to Siena. Now there's reflections in these photographs, there's all sorts of power lines coming through and they just are not pretty in and of themselves but there's just enough information there that I'll be able to go back and use some of these elements that I like from these photos and put them into the hill country from far north Queensland and by combining those two I think we can come up with a pretty good rolling hill scene of Tuscany. So I'm going to take this one image here from a little area down the road from my old house in far north Queensland and I'm going to use these shapes of the hills to form this new Tuscany scene. I can see that on top of this hill here in the distance we might be able to have some sort of city or maybe some buildings that reflect that kind of Italian character and then down here in the valley we might have a road that winds its way up to that little city or town on the hill and then maybe here in the mid-ground amongst this tree might add another tree but I might put an old farm building or maybe a ruin or something to add a little bit more interest to the mid-ground but I can see here the seed of the idea and hopefully this grows into something pretty cool. Now the first place to start is in the sketchbook and I have loads of these and I'm just going to sketch out my idea really roughly and come up with something without spending too much time. This is all about thinking quickly. I've landed on a particular image that I really enjoy and here I'm going to use this bit of photographic reference to form the underpinning of the image and then add little bits to it here and there to make this far north Queensland scene seem a little bit more Italian. Now you can see the idea is slowly changing as I progress from one image to another. I'm just making minor changes and again asking myself three basic questions. What's working, what's not working, and what if? So every time I redraw I shift something, I change something. Not every one of these drawings is the same although they do look very similar. Now once I've done my four little thumbnail drawings and I've got a pretty good idea about where this design is going I'll draw it again a little bit bigger. Every time I make a new drawing or a new sketch I have an opportunity to make changes and improve on the idea. So now I'm getting a little bit more complicated with my shading and I'm using a few more pencils rather than just one 2B. So my pencils will vary from about an H to a B to a 2B and then for the darker shadows I'll use a 4B. I'm following a very similar tonal dynamic here and building that into the design that I would follow in the painting. I'm keeping my darkest darks for the very front and my lighter lights and mid-tones for the background and this will help me create some sense of depth. Working with a broader range of pencils now directly onto watercolor paper I'm going to allow a little bit more detail to come through in this drawing. This is going to serve as a more detailed plan to carry on into the final stage of painting. Now this is something that I'm going to use in conjunction with my color study that's about to happen and this will really help me get all of the exact forms, tones and shapes in that final painting and I apologize for my hat getting in the way here but I was pretty absorbed in this design. Now I'd still call this a quick sketch technique. This drawing here took about an hour so when we combine that with the previous page we've got an hour and 15 minutes all up. It's a small price to pay for just knowing where we're going with the final painting. I'm getting a clearer and clearer idea about this composition and I'm liking it so far. By using a scrap piece of paper I can prevent any smudging of the drawing underneath and then with a darker or a softer pencil here this one's made by Palomino this can be used to go around the outside of edges and just reinforce some of those dark tones and allow this crispy detail to come forward towards the viewer. Now I've gone through the sketching process and I've got a pretty clear idea about where I need to go and it's time to do a color study. Now color studies can give us so much information before we get into the final product and one of the things I should mention about this process is that pretty much every step of the way we have a clear indication of whether this painting is going to work or not. Wouldn't it be great if everything you did you did with hindsight? As an artist you get to do this because we've already been there we can see clearly if this is going to work. The color study I'm going to set up it's going to be nice and small and I'm going to try and knock this out really quickly and I'm going to be using a very simple palette of colors. Let's take a look at that now. Now I'm using a very limited palette of Langridge handmade oil colors consisting of titanium white, burnt umber, ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow, quinacridone magenta, and cobalt teal. Now the yellow magenta and teal closely resemble the cyan magenta and yellow on your home printer and you can mix a wide range of colors from these three primaries. The umber and the ultramarine go together to make a near black color and then with that titanium white I can lift my tones and so from this limited palette right here I can mix a really wide range of colors and tones certainly enough to knock out this little color study. I'm sketching directly onto an 8 by 12 homemade linen panel. This is a fine weave linen and I've adhered it directly to some three millimeter plywood. I'm sketching in the major lines of my composition using a filbert bristle brush and burnt umber mixed with just a little bit of Liquin Original for my medium. Now here I'm not really paying too much attention to the exact location of elements but I am following this drawing so if things move out of sync with the drawing slightly that's okay. The purpose of a color study is to just make sure that my tones and colors are working and as long as I get a really good idea of how those colors work with the general linear aspects of the composition we should come up with a pretty good indication of how the final painting is going to go. Now you might be thinking that it would be difficult to make sense of this mess of lines but here I know exactly where every single piece of the composition has to go. I always start with the background first. I just find this method a little bit easier so the most distant element in the composition is going to be the sky. I'm using just a very simple combination of cobalt teal and ultramarine blue with just a touch of quinacridone magenta and a little bit of burnt umber to desaturate. This will form a deep purple for some shadowed storm clouds in the distance. Now on such a small painting bigger brushes can travel a long way very quickly and we can begin to get an indication of how this painting is going to work in no time at all. As I begin to bring these layers closer towards the viewer and start working into that distant hill I'm going to allow my colors to become a little bit more saturated and introduce even more pigment. This will mimic the laws of atmospheric perspective where things get more saturated as they come towards the viewer and conversely things get desaturated as they go away from the viewer. Because I'm working from my most distant planes of depth towards the foreground it allows me to slowly introduce more and more pigment and keep control over my palette. Also I'm paying close attention to my edges and these bigger brushes are allowing me to blend from one zone into another. This creates a little bit of softness and a nice painterly feel. Now green straight out of the tube can sometimes be a little bit problematic so I'm mixing my green here with a combination of cadmium yellow and cobalt teal. Now we're going to have to desaturate because that can be a very pungent mixture. So we desaturate with a little bit more ultramarine blue and burnt umber. If I need to deepen the tone and create some darks like I'm adding here in the mid-ground I'm going to mix ultramarine blue with burnt umber. That's a pretty good substitute for black. All of the brushes that I'm using vary from size 2 to 4 to 6 and they range in shapes from a filbert to a flat to a dagger like I'm using here. Now I've used daggers in several of my other tutorials here on YouTube and I love this brush because it allows me to make a broad line and cover a lot of area quite quickly but also I can drag and draw that brush to make a finer line and then if I use just the ends of bristles I can even make a fine point. Now if you want to find some dagger brushes check out Rosemary and Co. and I'm going to put a link to those in the description below. Now using my imagination here I'm going to take the hill from the far north Queensland photographic reference and I'm going to add some crops. I imagine these could be rows of fruit trees or vines. I'm not really decided yet but I want a little bit more linear structure on the right hand side of that mid-ground hill to lead the viewer's attention inwards towards the valley and then on up into that city that's on the hill. As I begin to mix tones for the foreground I'm allowing a little bit more saturation to come through and you'll notice now that these greens are starting to read as if they're in the foreground closer to the viewer. Now yellow light doesn't want to travel too well over a vast distance so this is going to be one of the first wavelengths to drop out and this is why these distant hills shifted to a blue-violet color. So if we preserve that yellow tone and our darkest darks like I'm adding here on the left and then with this conifer here in the center the combination of these two techniques will instantly create a depth of dynamic. This is one of my favorite things about painting is that we can create this illusion of three-dimensional space within a two-dimensional medium. I'm going to allow some choppier more fragmented brushwork to communicate this tree over here on the left hand side and you'll notice that there's another trunk coming down. I made the decision after doing the drawing that I might like to add a second tree. We'll see how it looks here in this color study but every step of the way in this design process I have the opportunity to make a change. We're still not at the final painting and even if we were working on the final painting then we're free to change so many different things about that as well but here all I'm trying to do is get as close as possible to a really sound idea that would make a great bigger painting and have all of that character that I was missing in my original photographic reference. Taking a little bit of this color that's still on the brush I'm going to add some highlights to the lead edge of these trees here on the right hand side. These exposed patches of dirt here in the foreground will add just a touch of randomness and make the painting not look so perfect. It makes it look a little bit more realistic by including some things that aren't quite ideal so a little bit of erosion here will go a long way. I begin to mark out where this architectural feature of this garden wall is going to go and the side of the house as well and you'll notice here the wedge brush is really performing well by allowing me to have that control and identifying these architectural shapes. I can then bring in the trees as part of the background to help define the sides of this architectural feature and now it's just a matter of covering all of these bare patches that have been left over in the background so they don't stand out so much. I'm going along and just killing these patches that have been left over that are showing through and you'll notice the color study is really shaping up. Again I'm reserving my darkest darks for the foreground and you'll notice this shaded slope is coming closer towards the viewer and now I'm just traveling around the color study and filling in the little patches of detail here and there and killing some of that background tone that's coming through. A dirt road forms a great linear vector that adds to the perspective and depth of the scene and then I can start to add a few highlights to begin to manipulate this image to push and pull that depth dynamic. With a bit of titanium white and cadmium yellow with a little bit of ultramarine blue I can allow some brighter grass highlights to come through and bring these mid-ground slopes even closer. This push-pull effect of depth is something that I really love about painting. It's something that helps carry that illusion of three-dimensional space. Now this tree here on the right hand side I imagine is going to cast a shadow down the slope across the road and then it's going to hit that garden wall and little elements like this will also add to the overall ambience of the scene and make it appear a little bit more realistic. My relationship of light to dark is what creates a sense of light within the composition so I'm keeping my shadows here a little bit cooler and allowing them to go a little bit violet also paying attention to the tone. If I have enough of a difference between the highlight and the shadow then it should create this illusion that the sun is peering through some afternoon clouds and shining and illuminating this mid-ground. I'm using my wedge brush to draw some lines to indicate a little bit more detail where the tree trunks and branches are going to go and the same brush can be used to establish some shadows under these branches of leaves. Slowly but surely the color study is really shaping up. Now some brighter highlights can be added with nearly pure titanium white and just a touch of burnt umber to earth it out a little bit. Now with just the end of a bristle dagger brush I'm going to establish some sharper shadows here in the mid-ground and allow a little bit more variation and contrast here in this zone. This is going to give me the indication that we have some shadows that are being cast by clumps of grass and again allow this area to come even further forward. So I'm using both the shadows and highlights simultaneously. I liken this process to kind of turning up the volume so to speak. If you can imagine that we have everything pretty muted and suppressed in terms of a color dynamic we can then turn up that volume by adding lighter lights and darker darks. As we do this in the foreground all of these elements start coming closer and closer towards the viewer and again that illusion of depth is starting to appear. I'm scanning the painting for areas that need a little bit of adjusting and the paint is still wet so I can blend and manipulate one zone into another. I also think about negative space and this is defining shapes by what's around it and here I can carve a little bit more detail into the trunks of these trees over on the right by just allowing the background grass to kind of come and meet that tree. We need just a little bit more life in this painting so I'm going to allow some livestock here to occupy the mid-ground space. Now I'm using that term very loosely because these don't quite look like white cows but I imagine in the final painting that I'll have a little bit more detail to really define these forms but all I'm after here in the color study is an indication of where these animals are going to go. And then with just a little bit more adjustment and manipulation of highlights I'm going to allow that sun to shine a little bit brighter here on this tree. I saved my lightest lights for the very end and here again I'm using this wedge brush to mark in the whitest branches. This is where the sun shining through that canopy and striking that branch directly allowing a bright highlight to Overall I'm pretty happy with this little painting. I think it's a great study to make a bigger painting from. With a few little adjustments here with some highlights and some last minute shadows I'm finished with my color study. Time for the next part of the process. So there you have it that's how I go about designing a painting but the whole process started with an idea and that disappointment of not actually being in the right place at the right time to collect that photographic reference that I thought I needed. I much prefer painting and creating in this way because it frees you up to create something that's really exciting and different. Now of course the first place to start once we have that idea is in the sketchbook with some rough sketches and then we can refine that idea further in pencil with a final rendering. And then of course you've seen how we produce a color study using a limited palette and now I have a really clear idea about where the final painting is going to go. Now I hope you enjoyed this video and if you did make sure you click that like button for me. If you want to come back for more make sure you're subscribed to this channel and as always you can find me on Instagram and Facebook but the most important part is make sure you're subscribed through my website at www.andrewtichler.com for bonus content. I look forward to seeing you next time. So long.