analogous animal oil painting

[Nicki Smith]

I took a different approach to painting my dog.

I’m interested in exploring the pink/red tones but I want to push them a bit more. I don’t know if purples would push the contrast a bit more because I feel like my darkest reds aren’t doing that.
Or maybe I’m not being risky enough with the contrast/ exploration or color in this piece.

Thank you for any feedback!

 

[Iliya Mirochnik]

Hi Nicki,

I quite like this painting, particularly in the work put into carefully observing the dog, and also in the treatment of the hair. Your question concerning working in reds is interesting and an important one. In school, I purposefully switched to working in red chalk because I didn’t want to have the full value range I had when weokign in charcoal. It teaches you to control and see much more subtle gradations of tone, and in my book, that’s a great thing.

There are a few things here that I would think about here. I think the soft edges (the one’s almost completely lost into the white of the canvas are quite effective. Some of the hard edges on the other hand, like the ones in the mouth and down the muzzle, seem a little sharp and almost outlined. I don’t think this approach lends itself to such a graphic treatment of edges and I’d watch out for that. As for the red, although, as I said above, I like the challenge, I do think that you could play around with working with a couple of different reds, pushing the painting into the browns in the darkest of areas. But start as you did with one color, and then push the darks as you need to. This way, you preserve the subtle gradations, but have the power to add punch where you need it. I would also make sure to either keep the background pristine or allow for more color to enter there. Another thing to attempt is to do the exact same painting but on a slightly darker ground. Even slightly darker, like a gray. This would also give you the ability to push lights with white.

Keep up the good work!

Iliya

 

[Nicki Smith]

Thank you for the feedback Iliya! I really appreciate the input.

I’ll be sure to keep this in mind for future works! I think I may want to try the darker background and see how that comes off .

Nicki

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