Ol'Scratch Art Print: Walter O'Neal / Professor Oreo's Painting Tutorial Extravaganza!! - PART I

By Walter O'Neal (Professor Oreo)

Okay, here’s the first part of the Ol’ Scratch painting tutorial thread I’ve been threatening to post…

I’m going to try to be as thorough as possible in explaining everything from A-Z, but I’m sure I’ll forget something and omit a thing or two along the way. Feel free to ask me to clear things up or get more detailed if I’m glossing over something that you’d really like to know more about. That being said… let’s make with the skoolin’!

Original concepts


These were the 3 concept drawings I first showed Jarrod to try and get and idea of where to go with the piece. We both liked the second over-the-shoulder one because it acted kind of like a preview movie trailer for the character - showing his full body but still only hinting at the character without spilling the beans like giving you a clear frontal shot of him would. These concepts were all done just in pencil on simple tracing paper, and without a copy of the sculpture in front of me. So he doesn’t look all that Ol' Scratch-ity yet, but I’ll tackle that in the final drawing.

Once I had the sculpture in front of me, I took a bunch of reference photos with the proper light sources and did a little ghetto Photoshop editing to get what I wanted.


Using those photos, I made a finished line drawing that will later be transferred to the final painting surface. I drew the body, wings, and background each on separate sheets of tracing paper so I could be as loose and general as I wanted while drawing each portion without having to worry about screwing up the other parts.

Final line drawings



Once the drawing is finalized I scan each part ( the body the wings and the background) and assemble them into one image in Photoshop.


Then I print out 2 side by side copies on a sheet of plain 8.5”x11” paper. Just using a 2B pencil, a bit of white gouache (for the highlights), and the reference photos I took, I make a general value study working out all the in’s and out’s of how the overall piece is going to look in black and white. This gives me a general guideline to follow while painting the piece, and I know the image will read correctly as long as I stick to these values no matter what colors I eventually use. This is my project bible so to speak and I will reference it constantly while working on the painting.

Value study


Okay, graphite transfer time! I flip over my full size drawings and retrace all of the final line work in a soft 2B pencil lead on the back.


I then take a burnishing tool and just rub the surface of the drawing to transfer the line work down on my painting board. Some people use store-bought graphite sheets that they lay between the original drawing and the painting board to get the same effect, but I’ve never been a fan of that and here’s why… Once I’ve done it my way and traced the line work on the back, I can be as careless and ruthless as I want to be when rubbing/transferring the drawing down on the painting surface. I don’t have to have to worry about rubbing outside of the lines or rubbing in the exact shape of the lines or anything because the only places where the graphite will transfer is where I’ve already placed it on the back… and that’s it. Plus I can get about 3 good transfers of the same line work before it becomes too light to see, and that’ll save me time in the long run. For instance, if I decide after I’ve already painted over the face that I want to re-transfer the eyes again; it’s an incredibly easy fix. Just drop the drawing back down on top and start rubbing - no need to precise about re-drawing the exact same eye shapes again.

Finally, let’s whip out the paint! For the painting surface I’m using Strathmore 500 series cold press Bristol illustration board. It’s a very thick board so it’ll resist warping when you get it really wet with a bunch of washes. It’s not exactly cheap (about $8 bones for a 20”x30” sheet) but I think it’s definitely worth it. I’ve taped off a nice one inch border around the piece using masking tape and a flat burnishing tool to really seal the tape to the board. Once I’m done with the painting I’ll pull the tape off to reveal a clean white border. By the way, all of the paints I will be using are Liquitex heavy body acrylic paints - from the tubes, not the jars.

The first thing I do is paint on a nice soupy water glaze of cadmium yellow paint. I hit it with a blow dryer to speed up the drying process.


Also - notice those x’s and +’s at the four corners of the board? Those are the registration marks I use to help me line up the drawings for transferring. I draw them on the board with a thin Sharpie marker and then I trace them individually onto each sheet of my final line drawings. So when it comes time to try and line everything back up again to transfer the drawings, I can use these marks as a clear guideline to know that everything is straight. I’ll cover them with some masking tape once I start using some darker colors so I don’t end up obscuring them later.

Next I glaze on some cadmium orange and focus more on the edges of the piece and leave the center alone. All the paints are being brushed on incredibly wet (very soupy) and then I hit the painting with a couple of blasts from a spay water bottle to break up any brush strokes. I’ll show a more detailed explanation in a bit when I’m, using some darker colors that’ll be easier to see. Okay 1 more glaze of yellow then another glaze of orange brings us here.


There’s a bit of subtlety and a touch of depth to the paint now from the 4 layers, so it looks like there’s a bit of atmosphere there. I’m still using the blow dryer between stages so that everything is dry and set before moving on to the next wash.

Now I wet the surface and drop in a wash of dioxazine purple mixed with some maroon.


And I IMMEDIATELY blast it with a shot from the spray bottle to break up the brush strokes.


The surface is VERY wet and I’m tilting the painting, using gravity to direct the color in the glaze around the surface. This isn’t an exact science and you can only control it so much, but that’s part of the fun. Some cool things will happen that you didn’t necessarily plan for, “happy accidents”, and you‘ll end up working them into the piece. It’s pretty nifty.

Drying it with the blow dryer ends up pushing the paint around a bit too much, so I decide to let this wash air dry. It takes about 10 minutes. I drop a similar wash into the upper left corner and let it dry as well.


Now I decide to transfer the background drawing including a few elements of the outline for Ol’ Scratch’s body. I transfer the top of his head, his shoulders, and his legs, just to give me a basic clue of where his body falls so I don’t end up investing any time building up washes in areas that’ll just be painted over later. Notice that I’m lining up the registration marks on the drawing with the ones on the board.


With the drawing transferred, I drop an orange glaze down to add some more color and start bringing all the sides together.


I throw in a thicker wash of yellow oxide on the right hand side to kinda build up some of a rock like texture, and add a couple more watery maroon/purple glazes on the left side to simulate the stalagmite structures I had going in the value study I made.


One of the washes makes this really cool element of yellow peaking thru the purple that I totally love. Sadly, that ends up being my favorite part of the entire painting... But hooray for happy accidents!


A little more yellow oxide for some rocks, and another purple/maroon wash on the bottom right to again simulate what’s going on in my original value study.


I drop a little black gesso into a spot where one of Scratch’s wings will be to make sure that I don’t make my washes too dark. I want the wings to be darker than the clouds so it looks as though the wings are sitting in front of them.



Okay here’s a better chance to show you how I’m laying on some of these washes.

First wet the surface with the spray bottle.


One of the perks of working with acrylics is that water won’t disturb what’s already been laid down like it would if this were done with watercolor.


Once the surface is wet, brush on some strokes of the soupy glaze.


Once the strokes are down, IMMEDIATLEY hit it again with the mist from the spray bottle to break up the brush strokes.


The paint will still stay in the general area, but you can tilt the board to gently direct it in one direction or another. You can hit it with a blow dryer to speed up the drying process, but be careful not to get it too close or you’ll start blowing the paint around as it sits in the puddle of the glaze.



Still building up some more darker washes in the upper right hand corner…


Okay here’s something kinda cool. Liquitex paint colors each have an opacity rating to tell you how “thick” the color is. It’ll say “transparent”, “translucent” or “opaque”. Transparent colors are generally best for glazing because they are thinner and won’t obscure the painted layers beneath them as much. Opaque colors are generally bad for glazing because they tend to get fairly cloudy when thinned and leave a milky haze over the painted layers beneath them. But that milky quality of thinned opaque paints is something I actually like because it has its own uses.

Cadmium Orange is one of those colors that can get a bit milky when glazed, so I float a couple of thicker milky glazes of it around the upper right corner to simulate a heavy smoky effect for my faux lava waterfall area. It works pretty well.


More dark purple glazes are added to build some more thickness in the rocky areas


One last glaze is placed in the upper right corner to help frame the image and keep the lightest parts in the center of the piece.


Here we have the final image of the background with all of the glazes done.



And here’s a quick animated gif showing the progress of building the background glazes

Time to transfer Ol’ Scratch himself, again using the registration marks to aid in lining up the drawing with the board.



That green thing I’m using to transfer the lines is a burnishing tool. That’s just a fancy name for what’s basically just a metal ball at the end of a spring-loaded stick. The spring is so you can adjust the pressure you’re applying - so if you’re one of those super heavy-handed *******s you can give the tool a much lighter touch, so that you’re not punching holes thru anything.





The wings are transferred as well and the graphite is sealed with a very thin wash of cad yellow acrylic paint.


If you don’t seal the drawing you can end up rubbing it off with the friction of your hand resting on the painting and it can smear. Sealing it also takes away the reflective property of the graphite so it’s not shining light back at you from certain angles.


Here’s the painting so far with Ol’ Scratch fully transferred.


 

Right away I’m jumping back into the background and using some straight cad orange to paint in the lava and separate out the tiers of the waterfall. I'm done laying down washes, so everything I'm painting now will be much thicker. I'm only adding enough water to the paint to make it flow off of the brush evenly.



Also I'm using that same cadmium orange to separate out some of the pseudo-rock structures on the right side of the painting.



I’m working with the washes I made previously and trying to use some natural lines to separate the lower gas clouds, forcing some of them into the background and some of them into the foreground. I'm using the cad orange to determine the tops of the shapes here.


Ah...time for the good ol' toothbrush trick. Take an old toothbrush (or if you’re Brandon, go ahead and just steal the one Jarrod is currently still using to brush his teeth) and scrub it into some paint. It helps if the tooth brush is just a tad bit damp but by no means actually wet.


Drag your thumb across the tip of the brush and it’ll flick little spots of paint forward. Use a test sheet first to makes sure your gobs of paint aren’t too large or too watery.



I flick some spots of cad orange just about everywhere and then some spots of cad yellow as I get closer to Ol’ Scratch's body in the center of the piece where it’s supposed to be brighter. I’m doing this to simulate some of the airborne ash, embers and sparks, you’d see around a large open flame.



I add a little cad yellow to the center parts of my lava flows for some highlights and that pretty much finishes up the background of the painting.




I’ll end up touching up the part where his legs meet the clouds on the ground, but that won’t be till a little later when I’ve actually fully painted in his legs.

The Finished background



Now on to getting my palette ready to paint up Ol’ Scratch himself!

I get rid of all my other paint and I start to set up my palette from scratch, mixing what will be my 3 main colors. I mix my middle tone which will be his basic skin color (yellow oxide, cad orange and neutral gray), the color of the darkest shadows (more diox purple and maroon with a touch of black gesso), and the color of the brightest highlight (some unbleached titanium with a touch cad yellow). Now that I have those 3 colors I mix a couple of transition stages between the middle tone and the shadow, and between the middle tone and the highlight color. I generally try to stick between 7-8 different color stages from darkest color to lightest color with my midtone right about… well, right about in the middle. If this painting were going to be much larger I might mix a few more stages of paint to make the transitions a little smoother for the larger scale, but on average a full range of 7-8 steps works just fine.

Here’s my palette… and here it is 2.5 weeks later … the paint’s still wet baby!



I’m using a wet palette set up to keep my acrylics moist so that they won’t dry out and will stay usable for weeks at a time. This way I only have to mix my paints once and don’t have to worry about remixing and color matching later. Check out this wet palette tutorial I put together for more info on the wonders of wet palettes and how to set one up. It’s the best trick you’ll ever learn for working with acrylics… Trust me.

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/35607420/?qo=14&q=by%3Ano-sign-of-sanity&qh=sort%3Atime+-in%3Ascraps


 

Now to finally give Scratchy some skin!

I start applying the paint by glazing a thin layer of my middle tone to set the overall stage for the general color of his skin. Normally I would glaze the entire figure with this middle tone before I do anything else, but I already like what I’m seeing so I just go ahead and get started building up the forms.



Working from darkest color to lightest color, I drop in the darkest form shadows where the front light source transitions into the back light source. I’m covering more ground than I need to with this dark color because I want to layer the next few stages of lighter colors over each other with a bit of overlap. That’ll help with the blending.


Okay, I move to the next lightest color and paint all of the areas where I think it needs to be, still using my graphite value study as my guide. Where this color meets the previous color I blend the edges by using really small light strokes… almost like making hatch marks with a pencil. Also I’m being mindful of the direction of the paint stokes and I’m using them to aid me in depicting the forms. Notice how the strokes are vertical on the deltoid, implying the vertical striations of the muscle.



The next stage is lighter and I continue to fill in where needed and overlap the previous color with some feathered hatch work - Still keeping in mind that I want my brush strokes to flow across the forms wherever possible to simulate the pulling of the skin across the muscle. The effect will become much more apparent in the next few stages.



I’m up to the middle tone I originally mixed, and it’s the one that has the most saturated color in it. It’ll get sandwiched between the less saturated darker tones I’ve already laid down and the paler lighter tones that’ll I’ll lay down on top of it. And that’s where you should see the most color – not in the highlights or the shadows, but in the middle tones.



Okay, I repeat all of the previous steps for the rest of the upper body and bring the entire torso up to my middle tone.



So, next stage up and the form is really starting to pop. The forms are really starting to turn and you can see how the direction of the brush strokes helps to give that sense of volume.



Notice in some spots I’ll add random strokes of much lighter colors well into the previous darker colors and purposely not blend them. Skin isn’t perfect and these little strokes add to that look of an uneven surface. If everything is too smooth it’ll end up looking a touch more like a cartoon or a mannequin.



The entire torso is taken up to that during this stage and I decide that I really don’t need to punch it up much more than this. I’ll end up hitting a few more highlights here and there with a color one stage lighter than this but they end up being very subtle and hard to capture on camera.



So here’s a little animated gif where you can see the directions of the brushstrokes used in an overlay.




 

And the tutorial continues!!!

Okay, I start over the entire process of building up the forms on the legs, still using my value study to guide me.



Here’s our first cast shadow. Up until now I’ve just been painting “form shadows”, (shadow areas on an object caused as the form of the object turns away from the light) and now we have a cast shadow (shadows caused by one object blocking and obstructing light from hitting another object behind it) which is an entirely different animal. My technique for doing these may be classified as a bit of overkill but it gets me the results I want. So what I do is initially ignore the cast shadow and paint the form as it would be if it weren’t there. So I paint the entire upper leg following the previous steps from darkest color all the way to the lightest color. Once that’s completed, I take the darkest color used in that form and drop a thin wash in the shape of the cast shadow across the leg. I try to keep it as even and uniform as possible. When the wash dries it looks thin and transparent and you can still see the form beneath it through the obscurity. It’s this type of transparency that makes the cast shadows look believable and different from the form shadows.



Notice how I drop in a little mini cast shadow where the edge of the skirt meets the thigh. It’s that thin wash technique and it's a very subtle effect you get with the transparency by doing it this way, but it’s worth the time in my opinion. Notice how the cast shadow completely blends into the dark form shadow of the upper thigh. Because the form shadow was painted opaquely, the thin cast shadow of the same color automatically blends into it. Since it’s already opaque, it’s not like the wash of the same color can make it any darker.



The rest of the legs continue to be built up. Notice that where the legs are showing beneath the fog at his feet that I’m only painting the sides of his legs and leaving the centers and the top edges blank. This gives the impression that the clouds are obscuring the legs without having to work too hard for the effect.



Once the lower legs are fully painted, I drop in the lower half of the same cast shadow from his arm and scepter over his knee.



Using the same build-up process, I paint in his left hand in the back. Notice that I’m still only focused on the main light source and I’m leaving the portions where the other light source would fall (the top of the hand, his belly, etc) blank for the moment. I’ll paint that in later. The reason why I’m leaving them completely blank is that the exposed background areas are bright enough to simulate what the second light source will eventually look like when I paint it in. So it’s kinda acting as a preview and it helps me to get a better sense of what the finished image will look like.


 

Using my second darkest shadow color, I start blocking in the darkest parts of the rear wing. I don’t want to use my darkest color here because I want there to be less overall contrast in that rear wing to set it further back in the distance than the rest of the body. Again it’s a subtle thing but it helps create a sense of space and distance in the piece.



Using that same color, I build up some glazes to bulk out the area.



Since some parts of that wing are supposed to be very thin skinned, I like having some of the background show through the glazes and I won’t cover it up entirely when I start building up my light colors. That way it’ll have some of a glowing effect, similar to when you can see light through someone’s ears when they are lit from behind.



I use my darkest shadow color on the closer front wing to block in the darkest areas.



I decide that I want to make it look like the wings are merging with the cloud structure in the upper left, so I try to keep the values of the wings and the clouds similar where they meet. I don’t want one standing out too much from the other. The idea of merging the clouds and the wings is all a bit contrary to what I was thinking when I was painting in the background, but I’m allowed to change my mind a bit… aren’t I?

I follow up by glazing that same color across the entire wing to block it in as well. I do the same to the supports of both wings where they meet his back. You can start to see how the wing in front looks closer than the wing in the back due to the darker shadow color being used.



Now I go through the same process of building all of my lighter colors on that back wing, but I don’t go as light as I did when I rendered the rest of the body. Again, I’m trying to reduce the contrast to set that wing behind the body and further into the background.



Here is the completed back wing.



You can see I left several spots fairly thin so the background light shines through the skin a bit.



I render up the lights for the wing supports just like I did for the rest of the body. I’m adding more of those random dabs of paint to give these parts a very uneven and almost pebbled look. I also drop in a few cast shadows with thin washes just like I did on the leg earlier.



I render up the forms of the front wing and go through the full range of lights like I did with his torso. You can see that this wing really pulls forward in front of the other one now. That effect will eventually be pushed further when I add in the second light source.



 

After looking at the piece for a while, I decide to drop back down to the legs and add some cad orange where the clouds meet the calves. This helps push the legs back and the clouds forward. I add some more cad yellow and cad orange to the rest of the surrounding clouds in the low foreground to add some more levels of depth to them as well.



The Bros. asked me to alter the tail and make it into more of a coiled shape. So I drew the new tail onto a fresh sheet of tracing paper and then transferred it to the painting just as before with the same graphite transfer method.




I build up the tail just like all of the other forms and bring it up to finish.



 

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