Day Seventy Eight: Normandy Road by Lewis Meakin
Hello and welcome to day 78 of 100 days of Tonalism.
Today study is of 'Normandy Road' by Lewis Meakin.
Lewis Meakin was an American Impressionist painter 1850 – 1917, There's not a lot of information about him online, but what I found, I read on today's video narration so please check that out.
Continuing on with our discussion regarding my artistic progression to becoming a landscape painter; yesterday I gave you some background on my history as a young artist, and the day before we talked about my exploration of digital media. Today, we are going to chat about my life as a commercial artist and how that has informed my work and led to me becoming a landscape painter.
One of the most challenging aspects of my job as a commercial illustrator was that I had to create artwork that was going to be printed with 1 to 8 colors. This always presented challenges and required quite a lot of planning and discipline to use only the colors I had available to me in the most advantageous manner.
This could be especially challenging when confronted with having to illustrate a scene from a national park like Yosemite in that I basically had only 8 colors to work with, and one of those would have been an underprint so that the design I was working on could be printed on dark or light shirts.
For example if I was to do the picture of a waterfall I would have to use white, black, gray, tan, light green, dark green and blue. That's 8 colors right there and you can see that it would not give you much in the way of color choices. The main strategy that I would use to solve these types of problems was to establish very good values and contrast in my supporting line drawing. This way the colors can act as accents. Also, quite a lot that can be accomplished in the way of modifying values using stippling and airbrushing.
An emphasis on solid values carries forward into the landscape paintings that I do today. I always have a good supporting underpainting that is done in three or four values at most. What's great to me after so many years of having to work with an extremely limited selection of colors, is that I have the ability now as a painter to create any color I can imagine using the 14 or so pigments on my palette. It's extremely cool.
There are several ways that working as a commercial illustrator led into landscape painting. As I said in a recent blog post, my job started out quite nice but became more challenging with each year as I was given less time to create artwork. There are other pressures too namely, inane and stupid changes being made to artwork that I created not only by buyers but by the designer that I worked for. This can really wear on you after a while especially if you have a strong love and care for art.
I decided that I would ride that job as far as I could. I was well-paid and quite fortunate as an illustrator to have a regular paycheck as opposed to working freelance. Many of the other artists that I worked with in my time as a commercial artist had been beaten down by the pressures that I just mentioned, to the point that they no longer had the love and care for art that they started with.
I'm very lucky in that that did not happen to me and I decided that when that job was over, that I would find another way to work. I left that job in 2010 but I had started painting in 2009.
Tomorrow we'll talk about the reasons why I started painting landscapes and about my early forays into oil painting.
Cheers,
M Francis McCarthy
Landscapepainter.co.nz
A bit about 'Normandy Road' by Lewis Meakin; back in June I had an exhibition of the studies that I've done for this series. At the time I sold about nine of them and Normandy Road by Lewis Meakin was one of those ones that I sold. I think this is because this painting looks quite a lot like New Zealand.
The study we are looking at today is my second version of this painting and I have to say I really enjoyed painting it both times as it is beautiful in its simplicity.
To see more of my work, visit my site here
 |
| Painted after - Normandy Road by Lewis Meakin, Study by M Francis McCarthy - Size 5x7, Oil on wood panel |
Today study is of 'Normandy Road' by Lewis Meakin.
Lewis Meakin was an American Impressionist painter 1850 – 1917, There's not a lot of information about him online, but what I found, I read on today's video narration so please check that out.
Continuing on with our discussion regarding my artistic progression to becoming a landscape painter; yesterday I gave you some background on my history as a young artist, and the day before we talked about my exploration of digital media. Today, we are going to chat about my life as a commercial artist and how that has informed my work and led to me becoming a landscape painter.
One of the most challenging aspects of my job as a commercial illustrator was that I had to create artwork that was going to be printed with 1 to 8 colors. This always presented challenges and required quite a lot of planning and discipline to use only the colors I had available to me in the most advantageous manner.
This could be especially challenging when confronted with having to illustrate a scene from a national park like Yosemite in that I basically had only 8 colors to work with, and one of those would have been an underprint so that the design I was working on could be printed on dark or light shirts.
For example if I was to do the picture of a waterfall I would have to use white, black, gray, tan, light green, dark green and blue. That's 8 colors right there and you can see that it would not give you much in the way of color choices. The main strategy that I would use to solve these types of problems was to establish very good values and contrast in my supporting line drawing. This way the colors can act as accents. Also, quite a lot that can be accomplished in the way of modifying values using stippling and airbrushing.
An emphasis on solid values carries forward into the landscape paintings that I do today. I always have a good supporting underpainting that is done in three or four values at most. What's great to me after so many years of having to work with an extremely limited selection of colors, is that I have the ability now as a painter to create any color I can imagine using the 14 or so pigments on my palette. It's extremely cool.
There are several ways that working as a commercial illustrator led into landscape painting. As I said in a recent blog post, my job started out quite nice but became more challenging with each year as I was given less time to create artwork. There are other pressures too namely, inane and stupid changes being made to artwork that I created not only by buyers but by the designer that I worked for. This can really wear on you after a while especially if you have a strong love and care for art.
I decided that I would ride that job as far as I could. I was well-paid and quite fortunate as an illustrator to have a regular paycheck as opposed to working freelance. Many of the other artists that I worked with in my time as a commercial artist had been beaten down by the pressures that I just mentioned, to the point that they no longer had the love and care for art that they started with.
I'm very lucky in that that did not happen to me and I decided that when that job was over, that I would find another way to work. I left that job in 2010 but I had started painting in 2009.
Tomorrow we'll talk about the reasons why I started painting landscapes and about my early forays into oil painting.
Cheers,
M Francis McCarthy
Landscapepainter.co.nz
A bit about 'Normandy Road' by Lewis Meakin; back in June I had an exhibition of the studies that I've done for this series. At the time I sold about nine of them and Normandy Road by Lewis Meakin was one of those ones that I sold. I think this is because this painting looks quite a lot like New Zealand.
The study we are looking at today is my second version of this painting and I have to say I really enjoyed painting it both times as it is beautiful in its simplicity.
To see more of my work, visit my site here
 |
| Original painting, Normandy Road by Lewis Meakin |