Starting at the Beginning

I'm going to be doing a winter portrait soon. It is inspired by my friend Maggie Stiefvater's soon to be released book Shiver (description from Amazon below). BTW it is available for preorder on Amazon as we speak!

For years, Grace has watched the wolves in the woods behind her house. One yellow-eyed wolf--her wolf--is a chilling presence she can't seem to live without. Meanwhile, Sam has lived two lives: In winter, the frozen woods, the protection of the pack, and the silent company of a fearless girl. In summer, a few precious months of being human . . . until the cold makes him shift back again.
Now, Grace meets a yellow-eyed boy whose familiarity takes her breath away. It's her wolf. It has to be. But as winter nears, Sam must fight to stay human--or risk losing himself, and Grace, forever.

It is also inspired by the fact that I love SNOW and while looking through American Artist a while back, I came across an article on Jeremy Lipking who is a master at depicting women in ethereal winter scenes.

I took my poor model out to the woods and snapped a bunch of photos of her in differing poses. I do remember telling her "Look out in the trees and pretend you are waiting for the wolf you are in love with to come out." I think it worked because I got some great poses. This is the one I picked below.

Like most reference photos there are some great things about the photo and background and there are some not so great things. Most notably, the contrast is too high on the background, it has way too many details, and there seems to be branches tracing around her head. :)

Here's a good deal of all the "stuff" I used to create a compositional study for my Shiver-y portrait. You can see the Jeremy Lipking article ripped out from American artist in the middle and then 3 different print outs of the photo reference - all with varying levels of contrast etc.

& here is my study, please click on it to see it better. It is just a little study - 4" x 6" and is sort of like a thumbnail sketch. I abhor doing thumbnail sketches, I must confess. The little 3 vlaue studies of weird shapes just never compare to the real thing. So what I prefer to do is an at scale color study using the same pencils I will be using for the final. This allows me to work out some of the most important colors/values and have the pencil numbers all ready to go when I start the real thing. Usually I do these studies at about aceo size or 2.5 x 3.5" and try to give them a good finish - that way I can actually sell them too. They look great in little 5 x 7 frames with a generous matt. This one however had to be larger because otherwise the girl would have been teeny tiny!

Here's a list of things I worked out by doing this preliminary drawing:

• I actually want the face and the background directly behind it the same value (although different colors).
• I want the darks in her hair and clothes to be the darkest in the piece.
• I want the bottom of some of the tree trunks, especially the one to the right of her, to also be dark in value.
• I can use the bright white of the light between the trees to direct the eye to the girl. That will be the brightest brights.
• I want to really get rid of details (ala Jeremy Lipking) in the background and mostly have big shapes, so I figured out which trees to have some definition and which to fade in.
• I decided to lift up the bottom of some tree trunks to get a restful spot lower left.
• I decided to enlarge the tree to her right.
• The color scheme is lots of greys, army green (in her jacket and trees), a golden green color, and an ice blue. Oh and the rosy colors in her face and hair which will be used just a little bit here and there elsewhere.

I don't always do a study before a piece, and have often regretted it. Its much better to get these things worked out before starting!

from American Artist magazine Jeremy Lipking article:

He prefers to work on one painting at a time, taking about 2 weeks to complete a canvas, and he chooses his content carefully. "When I am doing a painting, I don't think of anything else," he remarks. "If I am going to work this long on a piece, I pretty much like to know where I'm going before I begin."