Petr Stranik Art: June 2017

Friday 23 June 2017

Italian salesman

Back in winter I found a great reference to paint from. It's from my friend back in Czech Republic Nikola Adlerova, who is a great photographer and she posted the picture on her fB Pages.

FB of Nikola's pages

Here's the photo of an Italian salesman that she took on her trip in Naples:

It is gorgeous, isn't it?

I was especially drawn by the expression of the face so I cropped the image and started with burnt umber underpainting and after that I proceeded with opaque paint starting with darks (more transparent) and finishing up with highlights (put on with palette knife)

step No.1 Burn umber underpainting

Step No. proceeding with colour (from darks to lightest areas)

Italian salesman (Oil on canvas board, 6x8 inches)

It was just a small quick endeavour to have a fun and I hope you can feel it from this little sketch :-)

Pete

Thursday 22 June 2017

Gouache master studies

It has been a year ago since I stumbled across this great video of Jeffery Watts showing his extraordinary skills in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsTAsfjR_uk&t=3979s

On the basis of that video I did a series of studies on a rough watercolour paper in June 2016:

From top left to right bottom - my own character design (it's painstaking to paint from memory - I don't like it too much), Frank Frazetta's destroyer, Barbarian from Deviant art and some old warrior again based on some reference from deviant art.

After one year I decided to revisit this idea in more depth. I think I will continue to do these master studies in the future because it is so helpful in developing the sense of design, brushmanship and so on. I did all tree master studies based on the video. The hardest part I have to admit was to draw the pencil underdrawings. To see all the shapes properly in space and put them right. Skill of drawing is essential really - so If you can, don't trace your subject and draw it free hand like I did. Here's my final takes on those master studies.

Stranik after Watts after Cornwell

Stranik after Watts after Leyendecker

Stranik after Watts after Frazetta

I approached all the laying of the paint in style of tiling as Jeff Watts describes. I watched a chunk of the video for a few minutes, paused and tried to emulate the Jeff's handling of a brush. All of this took me three times more that on the video.

Keep learning whatever it is guys, Pete

Tuesday 20 June 2017

It's been a while

Hello all the good people from the internet,

I have to admit that I've been quite inactive for past few months - I mean blogging wise. I'm at the beginning stage of learning that beautiful craft of painting, art, illustration etc and I strive to get better every possible given time - that is - when I'm not at work. So I train how to draw, move paint around. There's too many topics to master - portrait, landscape, figure, still life. If I train in one realm for a while I can see almost in an instant that I neglect another area - It could be so overwhelming. Nowadays I seldom do my own finished work and if so I have this feeling most of the time that it is not worthy to put on the web - maybe because You can see all the beautiful work from another artists all around the world by just clicking the button. You can see that you have so much to learn ahead of you.

But, I feel that It's helpful to share my personal journey of learning in order to keep pushing, so I have decided that I'll share with you even my study progression and some of my finished work as well. At times, there would be something for sale on my DPW (Dailypaintworks) pages.

I would be so grateful for your feedback in comments - What do you thing about my work, what would you improve and If you're from Yorkshire area I would be really grateful for suggestion of collaboration if you're a fellow artist for example. We can do an plain-air trip together or to share some knowledge about techniques etc.

I intend to have my posts shorter and brief to maintain some kind of frequency. At times I'll post just a link to my new instagram endeavours to keep you briefly updated.

Sorry to be inactive and there's just some bits of training endeavour that I've been working on: