jayme del rosario | sketchblog

Rusty Ladle, 2nd Pass

Edges, color adjustments (decrease chroma) and working on the lighter end of my value range were my primary concerns this round. I struggled with the tungsten light source during the first pass. The warmth of the bulb is quite distracting so I took some time to assess the local color and the affect of the light source on it for this pass.

My poster study was a good reference and tool in helping me correct the key of the painting from the first pass, though it could have served me better. I found that my poster study was too chromatic overall and it was also missing the higher parts of the value range. To a lesser degree I repeated those mistakes, so I spent a good chunk of my time this round fixing the parts that I had made too green or yellow or too chromatic.

Once it looked like the color and value adjustments were working out both on the ladle and on the background, I concentrated on minutia and some details of texture. I hope to build up some of the rusty textures on top of this pass during my next and final round. Critiques or suggestions welcome.

Rusty Ladle

This is the first pass to the still life set-up of a simple rusty ladle. It’s under artificial lighting, and you can check out the poster study here. I’m attracted to the simplicity of the object, its colors and the old, rusty texture of the metal. And I just love the high contrast of the dark cast shadow to the light blasting the background and top section of the ladle.

I decided against a grisaille and started directly with an ébauche (first pass or underpainting, always in color – at least in the tradition/approach practiced by Bouguereau and other 19th Century painters), simply because the value range of the composition is so small and compressed. I wanted a base with color and value decisions in the underpainting to work off of for the following pass. It seemed that building on top of this and layering the textures on top of something with form, color and value made the most sense.