I begin with a black velvet painting...

Hello again!

First of all, I would like to thank all those who have viewed and subscribed to this blog - your support is so encouraging!

And now, on to this week's project, "A pair of leather clogs".

I could see that Vincent had been inspired by a pair of well worn, hard working and obviously typical peasant shoes.  The shoes look comfortable and ready to slip right on, or as if they had just been kicked off at the end of a good day's work.  As you would expect, Vincent did an excellent job conveying the contours of the leather as it conformed to the wearer's feet, and the shoes are firmly rooted onto the floor with a strong shadow to the right of each.  With just some simple brushstrokes and variations in tone, Vincent captured the interior and exterior textures of the shoe's leather.  The heels depicted in the painting look appropriately worn down and scuffed in all of the places that you would expect.

With that in mind, for this week's project, I was inspired by Vincent's Clogs to paint some well worn, hard working shoes that had belonged to my son, Duncan.

Like Vincent's clogs, Duncan's shoes were working shoes, and he had logged many miles on his feet while wearing them.  Duncan's shoes also had seen hard service - they had been stepped upon, and were scuffed and broken in so hard that they were in danger of becoming broken out.  I know he had worn them in all kinds of conditions day in and day out for as long as it took him to get done with his high school job, which required a lot of standing.

However, unlike Vincent's clogs, which were made of sturdy leather, Duncan's shoes were made of black velvet.  Duncan's working shoes were the tuxedo loafers that he wore as a singer in his high school choir.

The "velvets," as he came to call them, became Duncan's favorites the moment he realized that they were made with tennis shoe technology hidden inside very standard looking, hard soled formal shoes.  Those shoes, he claimed, could be worn all day or night (or both) with nary a pinch.  The velvets carried him to New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and more, and in them, Duncan sang his way into one of the top college vocal programs.

But even the velvets had limits.  After two years of tramping all around cities, climbing risers and being tossed wet or dusty (or both) into suitcases, the velvets were starting to come apart.  The stitching on the sides was starting to unravel, and the tongues of the shoes were curling and shrinking like an old apple collapsing in upon itself.  The soles were  nearly transparent, and the toes no longer met the ground, but instead had started to stretch, jester-like, toward Duncan's knees.

I don't know why Vincent chose to paint the clogs, but I figure it was because he wanted to honor both the sturdy, well made shoe and the wearer (Vincent himself?) who shaped them.  I wanted to do the same by trying to capture for Duncan these shoes which had meant so much to him.

I started with a "cartoon" of the shoes, which I did in charcoal on a cotton covered artist's panel.
Charcoal is nice because it is easy to erase by smudging it with a paper towel, but it can be a challenge if you are painting initially with light color, as it will bleed into your paint.

So I could refer to both the original and my own photograph as I painted, I also set up the project on my computer, which I can see easily from my easel.  The image on the left is the screen from the Google Art Project (GAP) which was discussed in last week's blog.  Duncan's shoes were captured with the camera on my iphone.

I set up my palette with the paints that I thought I would need to get started.  For this painting (and all of the other paintings I will do for the Vincent Project) I used Artist Grade (heavy body) acrylic paint.  (The "heavy body" just means that there is more pigment suspended in the acrylic than in a student grade paint.)

Because I wanted to paint in the rapid fire Van Gogh style, I was generous with the amounts of paint I squeezed out of the tubes, but I (thought I had...) limited the color selection initially.  The charcoal cartoon led me to begin with the darks, so I started with  black, purple and blue, filing in the dark sides and the tops of the shoes.

I kept the right sides of both shoes clean, because I knew that I wanted to add in the highlights that would, hopefully, make for a convincing "velvet in a spotlight" texture.

I used two of my favorite types of brushes on this painting, a filbert and a shader.

The filbert, on the right, is cut so that it is arched on the top and the bristles meet in the middle like the edge of a knife.  This brush is excellent for filling in with precise control.  Just below is the shader, which is like a tiny, long-handled angled-edge house painting brush.  And I typically use it just like a house painting brush - to cut in along edges.  It can also be used for creating shadows.

I try to start with the smallest brush I think will do the job - the smaller the brush is, the easier it is to control.  I also try to start with my newest brushes when I need precision - older brushes can be ornery at times.  But enough about equipment - now back to the painting!



I proceeded by adding in the lights - including not only whites and creams, but also light blues, violets and silvers.   I then roughed in the shadows, checking to make sure that they were opposite where the source of light was coming from (the upper left corner of the painting).  The magnificently lit right interior sidewalls of the shoes were painted with authority and confidence - and of course, (look back up at it now...) they were painted completely wrong -

I wanted to contrast the coolness of the tones on the uppers with some warm colors on the lining; I painted these in, trying to mimic VvG's broken line technique, which is MUCH harder to do than it looks.

The background was next.  Again, I was trying to paint in the VvG style, with directional brushstrokes that added texture and color to fool the eye into thinking that there was a flat floor beneath the shoes.

What I did not think about was checking back on the VvG painting to see the color choices he had made.

 In Vincent's original, the tone of the shoes was very close to the tone of the floor, which was very close to the tone of the wall behind.  Although it appears that many colors were selected for his painting (and really, there are), the image could be described as mainly ochre, moss, black and cream.

I, on the other hand, went radically off of the reservation here.  I had some awesome bright colors on the table, and dang it, I was going to USE them!

This color selection by the "whim of a mad woman" contributed a cascade of problems with my painting.

First, the warmly colored background was too close in color to the linings of the shoes, which gave the effect of the bodies of the shoes "floating" without any lining or soles.  I changed that to a more camouflaged color scheme, which was slightly closer in color to the actual caramel color of the lining (but ended up just looking like bad, well used carpet pad, I think).

Another problem was the cushiony part of the lining of the shoe was black, which was very close in tone to the (now corrected) interior sidewall of the shoe in the painting.  

My husband pointed out an additional issue - the cushion showed only in the left shoe; the one in the right shoe was (in actuality) obscured by the right sidewall of that shoe.  He said that my leaving out the right shoe pad (that I could not see) resulted in left shoe pad looking like nothing more than a shadow, with no corresponding shadow shown in the right shoe.  Stay tuned for the resolution: This will be corrected in the final image by my finally just going with the flow, and slapping a shadow directly on that left shoe pad!  Sometimes a second pair of eyes and a loose attitude about exact accuracy is very helpful...

Next, I shifted the lining from khaki to blue, just to keep it contrasting from the very warm red floor I had laid down.  I made the wall blue for much the same reason, just to lay cool on top of the warm.  None of these decisions actually enhanced the painting, but it was a struggle to figure out what to do.  I asked myself again and again, "what would Vincent do?"  Well, obviously, Vincent chose a more cohesive color scheme in the first place.  (Or maybe in the second or third or fifth or twenty fifth place - we will never know...)

What I finally went back to was Vincent's unified color scheme and simple composition.  Worn shoes on an appropriate floor.  Simple.  I spent some time thinking about where it was - exactly - that Duncan's shoes were.  I had taken the photo with them sitting on my dining room table.  This was done because the light was good there, but painting the velvets on the table did not seem particularly appropriate, and my apologies to any future dinner guests with regard to this potentially unsavory revelation...

Taking Vincent's direction, I laid down a lot of grays, blacks, creams, whites and dark neutrals to try to get the floor color moving closer to the color of the shoes.  I decided that the shoes were on the stage floor of the high school auditorium, which, in my mind, made it OK that there was a lot of wildly colored paint still peeking out of the dark neutrals.  I kept on adding more browns, blues and grays until I got it pretty dark, but it still looked odd.

I repainted the wall an institutional paste color (pretty much the color of the actual auditorium), and let the underlying greenish blue bleed through in parts.

These were only minor improvements. (Which I, unfortunately, failed to photograph - sorry)

Then it hit me.  If the light was falling on the right side of the shoes, then the light had to be falling in the same way on the floor!

I got out a new paint that I had purchased but had no idea how to use - It was called interference blue.

On my finger, it looked very light, shimmery, and was a purply/pinky/very light violet color.











I had some old paint on my palette and tried a dab of the interference blue on red, brown, blue, and a black/grey/blue mixture.  On the red, brown and blue, it dried looking much like what was on my finger:

(The samples look much more iridescent in the photos than they do on the actual red and brown paint blobs - upper right - and the blue paint streak below.)

But on the black/grey/blue mixture, the interference turned a brilliant, sparkly blue - it was the color of some fireworks; shimmery, electric and crackling with light!

And that lovely, weird, iridescent paint just might turn out to be the solution to my problem.  That shimmer could be the effect I needed to convey strong light without looking washed out or dull.  So, I pushed the interference to come from the imaginary direction of the light on the shoes, and then darkened (with a thin wash of more gray and blue) the opposite side of the painting.

So now, I'm calling it done, or, as Duncan would phrase it: Doneski!

Please let me know what you think - of the painting, the blog, the experience that you have had in reading this, or anything else that is on your mind.  Please also share this with anyone you think may be interested in reading it.  I have certainly enjoyed both the painting and the writing, and am excited to continue on with the next 51 weeks of "The Vincent Project."

Tune in tomorrow for the announcement of next week's subject, along with a discussion on why it is actually OK to copy the work of other artists (or is it?).