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Ol'Scratch Art Print: Walter O'Neal / Professor Oreo's Painting Tutorial Extravaganza!! - PART 2

By Walter O'Neal (Professor Oreo)

And the tutorial marches on!!!!

Now to attack the right hand in the foreground and the head. There’s a general art saying out there that goes as follows – “A painting is only as good as the hands and heads.” Meaning, if you don’t nail the heads and hands of the figures in your art, then the rest of the piece, no matter how well executed, will be dragged down because of them. Conversely, if you nail the heads and hands and skimp on the rest of the piece, the viewer will be far more forgiving and the painting will seem better than it actually is. So to ensure that I have a piece that I’m truly happy with from top to bottom, I generally save the heads and hands for last so I’m not tempted to skimp on anything.

I’m not doing anything new here that I haven’t done before. I’m still just working up from dark to light, and still being mindful of the direction of my brush strokes. So here’s a quick gif to show the build-up process.

Notice the small brush strokes that are directed across the form and how they help to give the impression that the skin is being pulled across the structure of the hand.

With the hand done, I start the face by blocking in my darkest shadow color and doing some washes to thicken up the area like I did with the wings.

I work my way up from my dark colors to my light colors until I’m at my lightest color (stages 1-4). At this point I realize that the face looks like total sh!t. The problem being that it’s too spotted and fragmented and the forms aren’t broad and general enough to really let the shapes read correctly. FCUK!!!

So I work on generalizing and refining the forms by covering up some of the darker colors and reducing the overall contrast. It helps to smooth out the face and let the overall shapes come thru. I also drop in a cast shadow across the jaw line and experiment with putting in the teeth, hair and eyes to see if I’m on the right track.

Still working with generalizing some of the forms, I glaze the upper-back-tooth area darker to help set the lower jaw line forward a bit, and I also thinly glaze a bit of the darkest shadow color on the bags under his eyes to give them sunken-in, goth, emo, my-parents-just-don’t-understand-my-pain, I-shop-exclusively-at-Hot-Topic look. I’m pretty happy with the skin at this point so I go ahead and paint the ear in to match.

I build up the rest of his hair in preparation to continue the cast shadow from his jaw over the rest of his head.

The cast shadow is glazed on and the shadow’s edge ends up being quite sharp.

I soften the edge of the shadow by feathering it using the same color of paint for the ear and for the hair that’s adjacent to the edge of the shadow. At this stage I’ve also added in his eyes. One of the eyes is meant to be a “blind white” - like that old master dude from the TV show “Kung Fu” (I’m totally dating myself here, but fcuk it … I’m old). Anyway, both eyes were built up from dark to light just like everything else I’ve done so far. On the white eye, notice the thin cast shadow coming from the lower lid at the bottom and how the bright highlight falls exactly where the shadow stops. You’ll also notice that I’ve started to block in the second light source that’s rim-lighting the side of his face. I’ll explain more about this second light source in a bit.

The rest of the second light source is built up and the face is almost done.

I refined the second light source on his brow line and I add a small highlight on his good red eye.

Here’s a gif showing the stages of his face from start to finish

Now that the really hard parts are over with, I can move on to adding some blood stains on his body. I chose not to add any blood on his mouth just because given that the cast shadow falls where it does across his face, I think adding some blood to the mix will only make the area harder for the viewer to read. So no face blood for you!

The blood stains across his body are done almost exactly the same way as adding a cast shadow, and in this case, with the very same color – my darkest shadow tone. Since my darkest shadow is pretty much just purple mixed with maroon and black, when I thin it out it looks like a very deep red - a blood red if you will. So using about 2 or 3 thin washes I lay down the blood color and I intentionally try to make it as runny looking and uneven as possible.

I add some blood to all the appropriate areas as determined by Jarrod’s paint master of the original sculpture. So I hit the shoulders, the hands, and the tips of the wings. 5823 zoom out with pointers

The blood obscures the forms a little bit (especially in the right hand), so I decide to punch up the highlights here and there again using the same lightest skin color as I used before.

Now that the skin is pretty much done for the first light source, I’m going to go back and paint in that second light source everywhere, just like I did with the face. This second light source will be monotone and won’t reflect any of the local color of anything it hits. Whether it falls on a black surface, a green surface, or a red surface… it doesn’t matter – this light source will look exactly the same on all of them and will not change based on the color of surface it falls on at all. It’s a much brighter, more general light so I won’t have as many color steps as I did with my first light source either. I want it to be a bright cad orange with some yellow highlights, so I start by mixing a midway transition from my darkest shadow of my first light source to my cad orange.

I ran out of space on my first palette so I started another one which has the rest of my second light source – some cad yellow, and a highlight color of cad yellow mixed with titanium white.

I start dropping in my second light source on his shoulder with some of that transition color. Again, I’m still being mindful of the direction of my brush strokes and painting across the forms.

I work my way up thru the lightest color of my second light source across his upper arm and shoulder.

I continue to work up the second light source across his back hand and his belly.

Here’s an animated gif of the progress as I go thru the steps of the second light source across his belly and back hand.

Using the same technique, I add the second light source to the far wing (remembering to not use the full range of tones as to reduce the contrast back there), the front wing, and the front hand and leg.

The skin is entirely done at this point and all that’s left is the scepter and the kilt.

I mix up some new paints and start to block in the forms of the scepter and kilt like I did the rest of the painting. As I build up the kilt I notice that my colors look incredibly green and kinda make the kilt look like a grass skirt…

Since Ol’ Scratch ain’t exactly Hawaiian, I decide to remix the shadow colors to add a bit more purple to contrast the yellowness of the skin and background.

Back on track now I repaint the kilt and the color looks much better. I’m using general horizontal hatch marks to build up the forms to add a sense of texture. Is it made out of leather or canvas maybe? Doesn’t really matter, the texture makes it look like its some type of material that’s different from the skin and that’s all that’s really important. I glaze in some small patches of burnt sienna to give the kilt a bit of a dirty look.

I really should have taken more pictures here but I got on a roll and worked too long without snapping any new shots. The basic turning shape from light to dark of the right side of the kilt was blocked in, and then I re-transferred the original drawing back down over that. Again, one of the perks of doing the graphite transfer my way – just line it up again and rub the hell out of it, no need to be accurate. I painted in all of the dark grooves and added some lighter patches around them. I then glazed a thin wash of shadow color to continue the cast shadow from the arm and softened the edge in the same way I did with the shadow across the ear.

I completed all of the little small knickknacks at the top of his belt building them up from light to dark. Also, the brown looking portions were built up with the same colors as the surrounding items but were just hit with a glaze of burnt sienna and the highlights were retouched afterwards. Notice that I originally planned for the rock wrapped up in twine on his belt to be green. I changed my mind since it called too much attention to itself considering the rest of the palette was so heavy with red, orange and yellow.

Same deal here with the right side of the belt, but I kept things fairly dark because it’s all still supposed to be in shadow. When I paint in some highlights from the second light source it really makes the forms read as finished.

I build up the face of the scepter to finish from dark to light. Note the little cast shadow where the hand meets the handle. The second light source is added in as well to complete the look.

Animated gif of the face of the scepter

I build up the rest of the handle in the same fashion. Note that the end of the handle is kept a little bit darker to keep the focus more toward the center where the figure is.

Animated gif of the scepter handle.

And here’s the finished painting.

Well, that’s pretty much it! The Ol’ Scratch painting is all done and all that’s left to do is scan it to make a digital file. The scan came out a bit darker than the actual painting, but it makes for a striking image in its own right. The actual look of the original painting lies somehere in between these photos and the scan. The photos are a bit too light and the scan is a touch too dark. But that's how it always is... You never know what a painting really looks like unless you're seeing it in the flesh.

Normally at this point I’d spray the painting with some Testor’s Dull Cote to seal the image, then remove the tape with a blow-dryer to reveal the white border underneath. However, I wasn’t sure if I was going to need to rescan the image later, and sometimes the sealing layer can create tiny artifacts and little mirror-like reflections when scanned which are a ***** to try and remove digitally. So we’ll save step that till later.

Well, hopefully this tutorial was helpful and chock full of nifty useful info. Please feel free to share it with anyone who has any interest working in acrylics.

Okay, that’s all everyone!