God Bless Our Love: Getting the Drawing Right

The large painting that will hang over my fireplace this year I have named "God Bless Our Love". It is from another line in the song "Grow Old Along with Me". 

When I really think about all the hopes and dreams I have for my family that has come out of the love my husband and I share; I hope, dream and pray that God will bless them.  That God will help them, comfort them, support them when they are far from home and still living at home. That they will turn to God in hard times and in happy times. That despite all the different needs we each have that God will bless us and we can find happiness in the midst of our trials. That we will feel His hand in our lives.

"God Bless our Love" is a moment in time that my dad would call a pay day.  It's those days that everything is right in the world.  The storm has stopped. The skies are clear. And you can see the fruits of your hard labors and they are delicious. 

This is the most complicated and largest painting that I have done.  Maybe I should say attempted...it's not done yet.  But I have faith and a plan that I will finish it in time for the exhibit.  

This painting is about 35"x46". It takes me about 12 hours to complete a 9x12 painting (that includes the thumbnail, the sketch, the value study and color study, and the finished painting time).  This painting is the equivalent of 16 paintings. So I figured I needed to plan on 192 hours to complete it.  

I'm not sure how many hours I have into so far but I do know that the drawing has been a nightmare.  The complexity of the eyeball stalks overlapping the rest of the room has meant every time I had to fix a piece of the drawing, I have had to redraw all those eye stalks again.

A problem I kept having was a perspective problem.  Dishes on the table weren't laying down.  Walls didn't meet the floor in a convincing way.  And did anyone even use a level when they built the walls of the room? Finally I realized that I needed to create the room then add the table and chairs and finally add the aliens. It wasn't a single drawing, it was 3 drawings layered on top of each other.

I went back to my light table and created the room on one drawing. Then I layered the table and chairs on a second drawing. The last drawing included the figures.

I finally could see a way forward. I also decided that if I left the eyestalks out I could position my figures as I needed them and then design the eyestalks after everything else was in place.

With my drawings more solid, I laid down a mid-tone color on my panel and then transferred the room onto the panel.  Since I was trying to get the structure down, I decided to paint the whole thing in a grey scale and I would come back to color after I had the structure in place.

The first problem I had was the walls weren't straight. They were not parallel to the sides of the panel.  They were off just a little bit. It looked like a mistake. It is better to either fix the mistake or make it look intentional.  Since I didn't want the room to look like it was on an angle, I got out the 4 foot T square and a posca paint pen.  I went back and drew in every line to make sure I had it straight.  No wobbly walls here.

My whole idea of breaking down the drawing into 3 overlapping drawings was to limit how many times I would need to repaint the panel to fix drawing problems. Here I was working on the first layer and I already had to repaint it!

I moved onto the table and chairs.  Fortunately that layer hung out on the easel for a few days and I had a chance to see that the chairs had a perspective problem as well. It didn't feel like they were all sitting on the same level floor.  I needed those chairs to sit down.  After I get the figures in the chairs, most of the chair will be covered, but I think one reason why I didn't like my several initial drawings was because these chairs were not behaving.  I had also not realized that some of the chairs farthest away were bigger than the chairs closest to me. Ooops!

Once again I redrew with a paint pen and a straight edge until I had those chairs laying down and playing nice. And once again I had to repaint the layer. I think there is a theme going on here.

With a sigh of relief I moved onto the figures. This was a bottle neck for me. I didn't like all the figures.  There was one in particular that had his back to the viewer and I thought he looked weird.  I didn't know what I was going to do so I devoted one whole day to redrawing the figures. I wasn't going to paint them on until I had solved the problem.  Making drawing my one thing that day helped me get stuck in there and by the end of the day I liked the figures a whole lot more.

I decided that everyone is having an interaction with someone else. And I drew the interaction and then placed them in the chair.  To transfer these figures into their chairs, I printed the figures to scale on my printer and then traced them onto tracing paper so I could see where I was placing them on my panel.  When they got in their spot, I tapped the top down and slid transfer paper in and drew over my traced lines.  Then I used some more grey scale painting to cement them into their places.  I was ready for color!

Next week: God Bless Our Love: Adding Color!