Last Steps and the Finished Product

Trivia question of the day:  How many spokes are there on a unicycle wheel?  Answer:  Thirty-six.  Thirty six very straight and surprisingly unpatterned torturous black spokes.  To get them just right, I chose not to freehand them.  I placed a piece of tracing paper over the painting and outlined the wheel and pedals, took that back to my desk and drew in the spokes with the aid of a ruler.  Then I placed it back over the painting with a piece of transfer paper in between and traced over the spokes to transfer the drawn lines onto the painting.  I still had to actually paint all those straight lines in, which I did with the aid of a beer and a lot of breath holding.  

I then went back over everything one last time.  I added another layer of paint to the background to enhance the colors and actually decrease the amount of brush stroke detail.  I added a touch more color to the skin tones.  And I reworked the hairline a little to try to reduce the look of premature male-pattern baldness that my daughter pointed out (thank you, Jamie).

And that's it.  The only thing left to add is the signature :-)

Thanks for joining me!

The Part I Can't Explain

This is where The Zone comes in.  The Zone is the mysterious mental place that an artist enters into, where time and external distractions just seem to fade away.  If you watched the show "Heroes," it's where Isaac Mendez went when he painted the future.  It's very hard to explain what I do at this point, except that I just start mixing, blending and adding color.  I paint an entire layer (or more) over the area I want to add color and detail to, and I just keep working it until I get it right.  

Books on painting will always talk about "organizing your palette" and carefully arranging the colors.  That doesn't work with Zone painting.  Mine looks something more like this:

Here's what it looks like with all of the flesh tones worked at least once.  The clothing and some of the unicycle have also received a coating of color.

I had originally thought I would leave the lower background as it was, but decided it needed more work. Here you see the main color layer for the entire painting.  What's left?  Not much.  After this dries, I'll add in the unicycle spokes and go back over the entire thing to accent highlights, augment color and work on any detail that needs perfecting.  Next post:  The Finished Painting.