Artwork by Michael Fraley

Model Study in Oils, Stage Two

2010-11-12T18:44:00.004-05:00

At this stage, I'm still using turpentine to thin my paint, working through the traditional fat-over-lean (oil-over-turpentine) approach. I'll paint with a stand oil-and-turp mixture once the basic problems of the picture have been solved, allowing the final top layers to consist of nice, glossy, smooth glazes. I'm paying more attention to the model's facial features in this stage, and I'm also establishing the light source. Another thing I'm establishing here is what effect the light is having on the model's face, shoulders and chest. As a result, there are more very light yellows and pure whites where the light is hitting her the hardest. As her features recede from the light, I'm using gentle venetian red and then burnt umber as we get to the back of her neck. The background is black velvet and the model's hair is almost black as well, so I decided to mix two different kinds of black to help "pull" her hair out of the background. All of my blacks are created using burnt umber and ultramarine blue. The background is a cooler black, so the mixture contains more ultramarine blue. The model's hair is closer to a very dark brown, so I mixed the black to contain more burnt umber, creating a slightly warmer version of black.

Model Study in Oils, Stage One

2010-11-12T18:27:00.005-05:00

I began work on this painting by airbrushing an olive green tone in acrylic paint on a 16 x 20 inch canvas. From there I looked at the model and tried to decide how I wanted to compose the picture. I could have painted a full figure, but I didn't want to try to force that much detail into what is still a fairly small canvas. I finally decided on a portrait, painting the model in profile. In this first session, I blocked in a lot of basic, broad areas of colour. Having the olive green as a neutral tone underneath the oil painting means that I can allow as much of that to show through as I want, working the lights and darks against the middle. The odd dark area around the face is just a result of the lighting in the room as I was working on the canvas.

Quick airbrush sketch

2010-08-19T18:54:00.004-04:00

I've been busy taking care of the old homestead here for the past couple of weeks, and so trying to draw or paint anything at all has been pretty close to impossible. Though I have some paintings I need to get done, I thought I would give myself some time today to just sketch for a few minutes. I loaded my airbrush with some burnt umber gouache and did one of my generic sad-eyed pretty girl heads on a big sheet of newsprint. It measures about 18" tall. These heads all tend to look like the girls in the old "Flash Gordon" comic-strip that I grew up reading. None of them are as well drawn as Alex Raymond's, but there you go.

Salma Hayek portrait - progression video

2010-08-13T18:15:00.001-04:00

Airbrush painting - Salma Hayek - FINISHED

2010-08-03T22:35:00.003-04:00

Spent the afternoon working a bit on her makeup, earrings, blouse, and the bit behind her head. Whew! FINISHED! It's hard to believe that I've been working on this since July 16.

Airbrush painting - Salma Hayek, stage five

2010-07-30T10:01:00.003-04:00

Some sable brush work on the eyebrows, eyelashes and the weave of the hair, otherwise it's airbrush. The brown of her eyes and the gentle shading on her teeth were the toughest parts of this stage of it. Not close to perfect, but it's starting to pull together.

Airbrush painting - Salma Hayek, stage four

2010-07-28T10:29:00.003-04:00

That phantom blot on her cheek took waaay too much labor to fix. Finally, though, things are beginning to pull together a little bit. Just a little work with a regular brush on some of the finer details, such as the texture of her hair and her eyelashes. For the hair, I painted in some strands in ultramarine blue, then airbrushed over it with black paint. At this point, you can't really tell what color I used, which is good. Unlike Superman, Salma shouldn't have blue hair ... :)

Airbrush painting - Salma Hayek, stage three

2010-07-28T10:23:00.002-04:00

My laptop with the SD card reader in it was on the fritz this past week, otherwise this would have been posted a bit earlier. Here's stage three, still nothing to brag about, but at least I'm beginning to model some of the features a little bit. Particularly worrisome, though, is that rouge-like blot next to her mouth. Not a good blunder to make. That will work out though ...

Airbrush painting - Salma Hayek, stage two

2010-07-21T09:58:00.002-04:00

More golden, red and olive undertones, with the beginning of some shading / modeling.

Airbrush painting - Salma Hayek, stage one

2010-07-16T13:16:00.003-04:00

My first post in awhile. Like most other people, summer just seems to take your life over ... but anyway, here we are again, back in the saddle. This is the first stage of an airbrush painting I'm making of actress Salma Hayek. Hayek has clear, sharp features and a sort of indefinable depth of "flavor" that makes her more than just another pretty faced Barbie doll. I think that's what I'm going to try to catch here, and that will probably be the most difficult part of all. I've told my wife that she's one of the few actresses who really looks like classic Hollywood.

The board is a standard 15x20 inch piece of Crescent hot press (smooth) illustration board. The colors are Createx airbrush paints. My gun is a standard Paasche VL. The first stage is just a faint pencil drawing and the first layer of color as I'm beginning to build flesh tones. Bits of frisket are protecting the eyes, the earrings and the gloss of her lips from airbrush overspray.

Some Favorite Art & Illustration Books

2010-05-19T07:12:00.003-04:00

In no particular order:

Hal Foster: Prince of Illustrators, Father of the Adventure Strip. By Brian Kane. Published by Vanguard Productions, 2001.

Testament: The Life and Art of Frank Frazetta. By Frank Frazetta, edited by Arnie and Cathy Fenner. Published by Underwood Books in 2008.

Visions of Adventure: N. C. Wyeth and the Brandywine Artists. By Walt Reed. Edited by John Dell. Watson-Guptill Publications, 2000.

Alex Raymond: His Life and Art. By Tom Roberts. Adventure House, 2008.

Everett Raymond Kinstler: The Artist's Journey Through Popular Culture, 1942-1962. By Jim Vadeboncouer and Everett Raymond Kinstler. Underwood Books, 2005.

My Adventures as an Illustrator: Norman Rockwell. By Norman Rockwell and Tom Rockwell. Revised edition published in 1995 by Harry N. Abrams.

The Brandywine Tradition. By Henry Clarence Pitz. Houghton Mifflin, 1969.

Gustave Dore: A Biography. By Dan Malan. MCE Publishing Company, 1996.

Grand Master of Adventure Art: The Drawings of J. Allen St. John. By J. David Spurlock. Vanguard, 2005.

"The Art Class," progression video

2010-05-07T22:28:00.001-04:00

"Art Class" ... ninth painting session - FINISHED

2010-05-06T10:44:00.002-04:00

Daubed in the finishing touches on the beams (far right), landscape in the middle, railing in the middle. Correction of the three beams that meet on the left hand side of the picture, as well as minor correction of the way the light recedes as the beams get higher.

Arms and Hands

2010-05-05T10:32:00.003-04:00

In drawing the human figure, nothing is tougher for me than drawing hands. Arms are a little easier, but when we get to the end of the wrist ... ah, then we have a problem set before us. All of those tapered fingers wrapping, folding around each other and somehow working together effortlessly. Then those parts join onto this veined and muscled structure called the back of the hand. Turn it over and find the hollow of the palm. Just an incredible organic "build."

These studies were drawn with Koh-I-Noor woodless colored pencils, and I built the flesh tone up out of six or seven colors - brown and violet were the most basic. Red, red-orange, orange and yellow rounded out the colors used for for the flesh. Just as in my painting, I've found that browns and purples blended together in colored pencil create some deep, nuanced darks - something that vibrates with life in a way that a black pencil just wouldn't in this circumstance.

Oil Pastel Doodle

2010-05-02T19:49:00.004-04:00

This is the sort of thing I doodle mindlessly when I'm just trying to relax.

"Art Class" ... eighth painting session

2010-05-02T13:37:00.003-04:00

In this session I've concentrated on the inside of the roof of the gazebo. It's tempting to try to detail every board in the structure, but at the same time, I'm trying to go with a "less-is-more" approach here too. In other words, I'm trying to give the illusion of detail, and I think that's working out. The colors here are a dark consisting of burnt umber mixed with ultramarine blue, a medium yellow for highlights, and just the least amount of white in the upper boards that I could get away with. I've also begun broadly painting in the trees behind two of the central figures, trying my best not to make the boys here look as if they have giant horns growing out of their heads.

Life drawings

2010-04-28T08:51:00.004-04:00

In some respects, drawing from life is one of the more difficult things an artist can ask of himself or herself. At first you think that it should be fairly straightforward, but it's not. If you're drawing from a live model, you find that all of those construction tips that you've learned from "how to draw" books are valuable, but at some point they simply aren't enough. You're not drawing from a manniquin or a doll. You're drawing something much more organic. The bones inside of the figure give it a regular structure, but the muscles, tendons, layers of fat (however thin they might be), etc. cause the human body to take some amazing and unexpected shapes.

The warm up sketches I'm posting here aren't particularly good or bad - they're just typical of what my pencil can find over the course of a one minute pose. Often, I'll start with the oval shape of the head, then move on to small indicators marking the model's features and which direction he or she is facing. That's often followed by a contour line meant to trace the shape of the spine, and then everything else is connected to that.

The drawing above was done in about an hour with my current favorite drawing "pencil," a Faber-Castell B6 graphite crayon.

"Art Class" ... seventh painting session

2010-04-27T15:27:00.004-04:00

After receiving a few critiques about this painting by friends on WetCanvas, I've tweaked the figure of the standing professor a bit. They thought that she looked a bit off-balance. This was true, but in my reference photo of her she was holding her right arm out rather awkwardly. It just looked odd, so I tucked her arm behind her in an effort to give the figure a little more grace. That apparently didn't help things. So, I've made her right arm visible in an effort to balance out the figure, but still without making her look strange.

Other than that, I've begun filling in the gazebo some more, as well as working on the stone texture of the floor.

All of this is far from perfect, but I keep on trying.

Art Class ... sixth painting session

2010-04-24T22:22:00.002-04:00

Tedious work tonight, as I tightened faces, hands, and began to paint in the background more fully. All of the painting was done with a #2 round watercolor brush, often with the slightest bit of paint hanging on just one bristle, giving me a line finer than what you'd get with a ballpoint pen. There's also a bit of colored pencil here too, and I see that the camera's flash has caught the gloss of a bit of it.

"Art Class" ... fourth and fifth painting sessions

2010-04-22T12:03:00.002-04:00

I was only able to sketch in and begin painting the last three figures yesterday, so I hardly think of it as a "painting session" at all. But the truth is the truth, so today's session is really number five. The figures are finally beginning to coalesce ... they're individuals, but gently blend and move into each other's space. Even when black meets black, it's a brownish black meeting a bluish black.

You might notice that everyone is part of the picture except for the object of everyone's attention, the model. That isn't to slight the model, but to shift the attention to an unexpected, yet interesting group of figures.

Painting tools & techniques

2010-04-17T11:42:00.005-04:00

I usually paint and draw on an old fashioned slanted wooden drawing table. The top of the table currently has a chunk of a large Canson "Biggie" drawing paper pad secured to the top with a few pieces of paper drafting tape. The drawing paper serves to both protect the table top and to give me something to test samples of mixed paint on. Is the paint too thick? Too thin? And since the color of gouache paint changes somewhat when it dries, my "Biggie" pad lets me check that as well. When I've managed to scribble all over the surface of the pad, I tear the top sheet off and I'm ready to go again.

A small, clear plastic T-square and a steel ruler are at the top of the photo. Most of my artwork is fairly small, so the 12" T-square usually does most of what I need to do. The steel ruler comes in handy for cutting strips of drafting tape, which I use to paint straight lines with. Used economically, you can get three or four strips of tape out of the width of the drafting tape.

Although I often use a mechanical pencil with a B lead or softer, I've become very fond of B6 graphite crayons lately. It's almost like drawing with a nice chunk of charcoal, but it doesn't smear anywhere nearly as much. I use a nice, thick Faber-Castell crayon. It's like drawing with a railroad spike. Erasing is done with a kneaded rubber eraser (not shown).

I use a variety of flat synthetic bristle brushes to paint with. It spreads the paint in a more even manner. Every once in awhile, I'll use a "round" watercolor brush with a pointed tip, but it tends to "dig up" and erase the paint if you aren't careful. More on that below.

I use a mixture of Turner, Winsor-Newton and Lukas brand gouache paints. Colors are white, burnt umber, ultramarine blue, blue lake, crimson, scarlet, medium yellow, lemon yellow, and a Lukas premixed "flesh" tone. I don't use a pre-mixed black, preferring to use burnt umber mixed with ultramarine blue. Mixed correctly, it provides a wonderful, dense black.

I often paint on smooth or vellum surface bristol board, simply because it's what I have the most of. However, for the painting I'm currently working on, I'm using a 15x20 inch piece of Strathmore smooth surface illustration board. A "bad" part of the painting can be wiped off of the smooth surface, which is good. On the other hand, a "good" part of the painting can almost be erased with your brush if you use it a little too heavyhandedly.

"Art Class" ... second and third painting sessions

2010-04-17T10:58:00.006-04:00

I continued work on this gouache painting of my drawing class on April 14, made some progress, and then promptly got sick again, thanks to my continuing struggles with Spring time allergies.

That stalled me for a few days, then this morning I picked up the brush again and pushed forward ...

"Art Class" ... first painting session

2010-04-14T11:17:00.003-04:00

Laying out an underpainting in gouache, working essentially from dark to light. All I'm concerned with at this stage are large masses of color, so it will look a little like "paint by numbers" for awhile.

As I work on other things ...

2010-04-14T01:01:00.007-04:00

There's less than a month left of the Spring semester for me at IPFW, so there hasn't been a great deal of time to do anything of general interest for anyone watching the blog here. I will be making some "work-in-progress" posts as I work on a project for my Figure Drawing class, but until then here are some links to posts by some of the great people you might find down the right hand side of this page.

"Hail to the Kings"
Jeff Anderson puts a great deal of work into his gig posters, and I love this playing card design.

"After Dinner"
David Blaine Clemons doesn't just have a (to me) encyclopedic amount of knowledge regarding paint and paint making - he also is able to practice the craft of painting very, very well. This painting is done in casein, a milk-based tempera paint that deserves more attention.

"Martha Sawyers: 1902-1988"
Recently Leif Peng began a blog devoted to the unsung female illustrators of the mid-20th century. One of the most fascinating women he's profiled has been Martha Sawyers, a globe trotter and a top notch artist as well.

Talk to you soon!

He won't leave me alone ...

2010-04-09T11:34:00.003-04:00

... until I paint him. He's been trying to get out of my mind and down on paper for the last four days now. Gouache on vellum surface bristol board, about 6x9 inches.

Monochromatic Portrait

2010-04-09T00:14:00.002-04:00

A year or so ago I saw a picture of a woman from the 1920's, I believe. I decided that I'd experiment with a portrait painted in cool blues. Gouache on hot press illustration board.

Illustration for Ghoulardifest 2008

2010-04-08T09:37:00.004-04:00

This was the first illustration I did for Cleveland's Ghoulardifest, in 2008. From left to right, we have Ernie "Ghoulardi" Anderson, Bob "Hoolihan" Wells, "Big Chuck" Schodowski, and "Lil' John" Rinaldi. It was gratifying (and just a little strange) to see this drawing plastered all over everything there that year - flyers, posters, DVD covers, T-shirts ... I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up being a fan's tattoo at some point. As with the last one, the drawing was done in pen & ink on vellum surface bristol board, about 8-1/2x11 inches.

Illustration for Ghoulardifest 2009

2010-04-07T22:12:00.000-04:00

I'm originally from the Cleveland, Ohio area, and one of the local obsessions for the people of my generation has been the 1960's horror movie host Ghoulardi, and his successors, Bob "Hoolihan" Wells, "Big Chuck" Schodowski, and "Lil' John" Rinaldi. Although the long-running series ended a few years ago, an annual Ghoulardifest has continued. Below is an illustration I did last year for the festival. It's based on an old piece of stock footage that was sometimes inserted into horror movies as a gag back in the Ghoulardi era (1963 - 1966). A creaky old door would open ... a girl screams in terror ... and this is what we see:

The drawing was done in pen and Higgins Black Magic India ink on a sheet of vellum surface bristol board that is roughly 8-1/2x11." I used various crow quill and dip pen nibs, as well as a brush to reinforce the outline. I scanned the drawing and placed the lettering in Adobe Illustrator.

Along the St, Joseph River

2010-04-07T15:53:00.000-04:00

This past fall, my wife took some video of me alongside the St. Joseph River here in Fort Wayne in order to help me with one of my classes. I took a screen capture from the video and thought that it would make a nice basis for a painting in gouache. Gouache, or body color as it is sometimes known, is a wonderful medium. It's actually an opaque watercolor, and is just as easy when it comes to cleaning up as transparent watercolors are. I'm using Turner gouache paints on smooth finish bristol board for this sketch, which measures about 5x7 inches. I'd like to eventually turn this into a more finished painting.