…how I start a painting. Hopefully these stories that I am sharing set the scene about where a painting comes from, but sometimes that question is more of a technical one. As in, how do I start a painting. In that case, I use a charcoal transfer to create a heat map of lights and darks.
I start with the reference photograph scaled to match the size of the painting and printed in black and white. I then cover the back of the printout in charcoal and tape the it to the surface of the painting, with the charcoal against the painting surface. Now I trace the out the areas defining the lights and darks. Every mark I trace (usually in colored pen to help me see the marks I’ve made) on the photo gets transferred to the painting surface in charcoal.
I like to think of the result as a topographic map of light and dark. Sometimes it looks like nothing at all, sometimes it is a pile of spaghetti, and sometimes it can look like a paint-by-numbers without the numbers. But its function is to help me quickly define shapes. To know what those shapes are, I usually go back in with straight diagonal lines to define the areas of light and dark. Just like cross-hatching, more lines equal darker areas while no lines are the lightest ones.
This process also tells my future. If it is quick and easy and I can get it done in a studio session, the painting is usually around 50 hours of painting time. If it takes me a few days to map out, then the painting will be measured in hundreds of hours of painting time. And if it takes me a week, well, there goes my next year (it has happened).
