This painting is by far the largest one I've ever worked on. Usually I stick to my trusty middle sized formats with 30cm x40cm MDF panels being my usual work horses.

There are basically two main reasons why I wanted to give it a shot and paint something which is wildly larger than what I am used to. The first reason is that I do believe that every artist has a zone where the size of a painting or drawing just "feels right" for them. Personally I always had the feeling that I prefer working on larger formats. I never could get used to working in sketchbooks for example. It always just felt too small having to hold that pencil in the same way I do when I write something down, rendering tiny details. Working larger, like A3 sized paper always just felt right to me. Same with digital media- as many times as I tried getting used to painting on an Ipad it always felt very cramped and uncomfortable for me. So yea this huge ass painting is basically just a test for me to figure out where the other end of the spectrum lies for me.

The second reason is somewhat linked to the first one in that the act of painting itself becomes kind of different. The fact that large images like that are generally viewed from a larger distance allows me as a painter to be much more liberal with my brushstrokes. I can use super big brushes and render forms MUCH more loosely as the distance between the viewers eye and the painting will kind of merge everyting together.

Now this always kind of happens and is something that I strive for in every painting but on smaller paintings this happens on a much smaller scale, while on a monster like this I can paint even smaller details with large hardware store brushes.

Now as for the process on the theoretical side it's really not that much different than from my smaller work. I used to call this stage the underpainting stage but I have switched to calling it the "mapping" stage some time ago. An underpainting -for me- is something like a grisaille painting where the entire thing, including (or especially) the form rendering is solved on a monochromatic level. If I were to paint a grisaille I would basically go in and paint a more or less finalized black and white version of the entire painting which would then be colorized using glazes in the next stage.

This is not quite what I am doing here. What I am much more striving for is to "map out" the distribution of my light, my dark and my "middletone" shapes. Composition is much more a concern here than anything else for me. In this case I want to see if I can get my lightest values to travel in a circular motion through the painting. From the huge windows, down via the rimlight on the person, down across the light shapes of the books and papers, through that jungle of a plant back to the windows. What's interesting for me here is that "journey" those lightest lights are going through: From enormous graphic shapes to tiny pieces of representational rendering in the portrait, back to small graphic and angular shapes of the books and leaves. In a way what I am doing here is checking if a theoretical idea I had in my mind before would actually work when applied to a painting.

In this case I am super pleased because it seems to work out as I planed wich is always great.

There is a second use of that phase as well. It is a great way to prepare the painting for the next stage, which is going to be the color block in. In that way it DOES actually do a similar thing a typical underpainting would. It's also a great confidence booster because I know that if I were to just add colors of the exact same values onto these brown shapes it is quite likely that I will end up with a somewhat successful painting.

ALSO I am not going in blindly here. A few weeks ago I made a little poster study of this painting on a small panel to check how my colors would work. I am going to do a seperate post on these preliminary studies at one point because in the last couple of years those became a CRUCIAL part of my process. Another thing I made beforehand was a quick drawing of the portrait, which I transfered to the canvas. I want the portrait to be nailed down pretty accurately, so doing a study in advance is - for me - the way to go there.

OKAY to bring this post to an end. Where are we at here? We have a poster study, so we worked out the colors and values. We transfered the "value map" onto the large canvas and it seems to be working out nicely. We have nailed down the drawing of the portrait and the hand. I dare to say that we have done our homework and hence we set ourselves up to paint a pretty cool bigass painting here.

Let's see how it'll go!

Conquering a large painting

Swimming in Oil Soup

Portrait of George Orwell