Tagged: painter

Donato’s Painting Joan of Arc DVD.

Maybe you live in a place without art schools, maybe you can’t afford art school, or maybe you just feel lonely when working by yourself in the studio all day. One of the fantastic innovations brought by digital cameras and editing technology is the possibility to make instructional videos  that are both affordable and specialized. That means that even if your potential market is somewhat limited, you can make a DVD or a downloadable video and have reasonable expectations that it will cover it’s costs. This has led to a boon of new material in the field of illustration.

I have a few DVDs and quite a bunch of downloaded videos (all legit!) but I’m going to start with the most recent one: Donato Giancola‘s Painting Joan of Arc (link to product description on Donato’s site.) This is Donato’s second DVD, the first being The Mechanic, produced by Massive Black/ConceptArt.org. Both follow the process involved in producing a finished oil painting.

The trailer

The review

I put this DVD on my second monitor while I was working on Photoshop. I did miss  a few little details, but I still got most of it. Donato takes the viewer from the idea behind the piece to the finish. He  covers thumbnails, drawing on top of them to explain what he’s trying to achieve with each composition and how each thumbnail builds on the previous ones. The viewer gets to see not only what he does, but also why.  The motivation and emotion behind the piece is given a prominent place in this video, it’s not a nuts and bolts, Bob Ross like process, and it will not hold you by the hand to do your own just like it.

The painting itself, while being figurative and highly rendered, has a fairly abstract composition and I’m not sure the composition concepts seen in the video are accessible to someone just starting to paint. I have heard Donato talk about composition several times and I’m still not sure how well I understand his approach.

After the thumbnail phase is done, we are shown a short segment  where Donato shoots his references, and then compiles them into a composite image that will be the guideline for the definitive piece. This painting is done on primed plywood so we see how the surface is prepared and how the drawing is transferred onto the surface.

Then there is a acrylics under-painting phase, a short palette set up phase and he jumps straight into painting a guy’s hand. This hand in turn becomes the baseline against which values and colours of other parts of the painting are compared. Obviously, some parts are skipped or accelerated because it takes way more than 4 hours to paint something like that but we follow Donato as he paints the main faces, some chain-mail and plate-mail, a banner, hair and the important part is the running commentary as he paints on what he’s doing and why he’s doing it like that. Sometimes he has to make hard choices and he narrates his decision taking process as it happens.

Conclusion

There also are a few more general advice but I think the strength of this video is to follow a master as he builds his piece, one decision at a time. Donato considers the emotional and narrative impacts of his piece even more than the visual impact and he never talks down to the viewer. So my take is this is a great educational DVD, but it might be more appropriate for someone with basic knowledge of painting and composition than a complete neophyte.

A WiP by DOnato at IMC 2011

This is a work in progress shot of Donato’s Frodo painting that he was working on at the IMC 2011. We can see the drawing itself, parts are just washed in acrylics and the one foot is refined in oils, becoming the standard for the rest of the painting. As you can see, this is a fairly unconventional composition.

Mon chum est un pirate

Voici une image sur laquelle je travaille ces temps-ci.

Je l’ai aussi amenée dans Painter et je me suis amusée avec le Sargent brush. J’aime bien. Mais je cherche une façon d’avoir un effet semblable mais avec plus de controle.

John William Waterhouse in Montreal

First I want to wish all my readers a Happy New Year! Thank you for reading my ramblings! I hope 2010 brings you lots of art and work.

We had planned of taking advantage of the fact that we were in Montreal for the New year and go see the Waterhouse exhibit (finally!) I had read James Gurney’s review of the exhibit and it had gotten my hopes high!

Gurney Journey visit to Montreal part 1
Gurney Journey visit to the museum part 2


We got to the museum early in the afternoon of the 31st. We knew that the museum closed early on that day so we wanted to make the most of our visit. There weren’t too many visitors so we had a good view of the paintings. As usual, people take their time at the begining of the visit but were in much more of a hurry in the later rooms, that suits me fine!

So as we came in, we noticed that the exhibit was set against matte black walls accented by deeper glossy black, I love working blacks glossy against matte and it made me want to work like that again! The set up was beautiful yet it did not steal the attention from the pieces. There was plenty of space in front of the huge pieces with benches so one could sit and contemplate the masterpieces. One of the things that doesn’t really render in prints or scans is how painterly some parts of the paintings are. Maybe because a scan or a print can only be a small fraction of the size of the original. Some of these are HUGE… Definately worth seeing. There also was a projection that was part of the Waterhouse exhibit but it was a  bit abstract for me and I didn’t see the link with Waterhouse so I didn’t stay for the whole thing.

At the same time, there was a smaller exhibit about Napoleon sowe went to see that, the paintings tended to be a  bit stiff but the marbles were all kinds of awesome. There was also a whole lot of silverware and artifacts related to Napoleon’s reign. Not a bit exhibit, but if you are there, it’s worth taking a walk through there.

And since we had a wee bit of time left, we went to the basement to see the contemporary art rooms that we usually never have time to see. We usually skip the contemporary art to go see the Bouguereau and the dutch still lives sections. Well, there were the obligatory Borduas and Riopelle which are not ininteresting but they are exactly like the ones at Musée d’Art Contemporain so it was a bit disapointing. We saw a whole lot of crap, some interesting concepts, stuff that was definately decorative and made a few discoveries. One was Harold Town‘s Snap # Double envelope from 1976 and one was Dorian Fitzgerald‘s The Throne Room, Queluz National Palace, Lisbon made in 2009. It’s kind of hard to find cohesive information about these artists online! Dorian, upgrade your website!

All in all, it was a very good visit. The exhibit about Waterhouse finishes on February the 7th so you still have a month to go.

You can see more about the exhibit here. Or about the museum in general here.