Tracey Costescu Fine Art

Oil Painting from Life - Stephanie What a perfect way to start off the summer...start summer in June and start it with a 10 day workshop with Giorgio Dante! I am so fortunate to have another opportunity to study with yet another amazing artist and instructor. Not to toot my own horn, but I am really proud of my painting :)  I rarely do figures and I have not had nearly as much practice this year as I had hoped working from live models whether it be drawing or in oil.  Something I plan to correct this season ;)  Our model was Stephanie, a model that I often book for our Suite E Life Drawing sessions so it was nice to see a familiar face even though I did not paint it ;) The workshop was 10 full days and we spent the first two days working on a drawing which I will have to post later as I need to get a photo of it.  The drawing was smaller and included the full body and face. It was a great way to get warmed up and get familiar with the model as well as the lig...

Well, that was fun, well fun like a long workout is when you are done ;) It definitely helps to have good music when paint mixing as sometimes it can seem like it can take forever to get the exact mix you are looking for.  It is so worth it though as there is nothing better than having all of your paint premixed in clean little tubes so that you can squish out fresh paint every time you paint.   I have thought of mixing while sipping a glass wine or martini but I am sure I would end up with very sub par mixes ;) I don't premix all my colors but I find it so helpful to premix a flesh palette as I may not get the chance to paint every day, especially in the summer, and there is nothing worse than mixing up your paint and then having to through it all out because it did not keep between sessions.  Also, as some days I only have an hour to two to paint and if I have all of my colors premixed, I get to spend almost all of the time painting rather than g...

I often get asked what paints, brushes & supplies I use so I thought I would create a post with images for all us visual learners to make sharing the info easier. These are the supplies that I use when I teach my workshops and art classes.  My next class starts in March, please visit http://register.asapconnected.com/EventDetail.aspx?pk=343461 if you would like more information. Brushes   Silver Bristalon Synthetic Round s - Absolutely LOVE these brushes! They allow you to scrub to your hearts content yet the bristles stay together nicely and do not splay.  They may break down over time, but they always retain their shape and you don't get that annoying odd stray hair sticking out the side as you usually do with scrubbing brushes.   Silver Ruby Satin Synthetic - Again love this brush.  Excellent snap, soft yet able to achieve fine control.  Very resilient brush. Rosemary & Co Ivory Long Flat - Love, love these brushes for a...

Grisaille - Oil on Panel - 8x10"  This is the first oil pass of the grisaille for a piece I am working on.  The original drawing can be viewed at http://tcostescu.blogspot.ca/2014/07/shell-leaf-pitcher-study-graphite-on.html   For this painting I transferred the drawing onto the panel using an oil transfer (I will blog about how to do this in the near future). Once the transfer was dry, I did a light burnt umber layer to workout the main values, unfortunately I forgot to take a photo of this step. Next time ;) When the burnt umber layer was completely dry, I used my pre-mixed oil paints from a value of 2 to 9 (2 darkest value, 9 near white value)  At this stage I focused on trying to really correctly record the tilts and angles of my subjects from my still life set up.  Working from life is more challenging than working from a photo but so much more fulfilling as there is just so much more information about the form to work from. The paint is app...

Quick Oil Sketches on Paper For these sketches I was experimenting with different surfaces to paint on for my practice sketches & color studies.  The painting on the far left was done drawn first with charcoal and then painted using a monochromatic values on Arches Oil Paper, the painting in the middle was done with a quick burnt umber sketch with the brush directly on the paper and then overpainted with the monochromatic values (a copy of a painting by John Singer Sargent that does not really look like the original but I loved her look so kept her as is :)) done on gessoed Arches watercolor paper and the painting on the right was painted in the same manner as the Sargent copy but on canvas paper.  My favorite surface by far was the gessoed Arches watercolor paper, although the Arches Oil paper was a close second and I think with a coat of gesso it would be my fav...other than price.  The canvas paper was my least favorite as it is very slipp...

Sea Shell Study - 8x10" Oil on Panel This is the third stage of the sea shell painting I have been working on.  The first session I painted the open grisaille and the second session I painted the closed grisaille .  This session I use a full color palette of colors that I had premixed. I mixed up strings of yellow, orange and purple for the shell.  For the cloth I mixed up a string of blue.  Mixing up strings takes a bit of time but make the painting process so much more enjoyable as I do not need to think about color as much and I can focus on just painting.  With the premixed colors, I still need to mix during the painting process, but only small adjustments to shift the value, hue and chroma as needed. Of course I was making drawing adjustments all the way along. Even if I had done a drawing prior to starting painting I would be doing drawing adjustments but they would be much smaller adjustments.  As I drew directly with paint for drawing, ...

Oil Sketch - Around the Bend $95 Framed This is another quick little oil sketch I did during the summer when I was trying to get ready for an upcoming Plein Air workshop that I signed up for.  I worked from my imagination for this one and was experimenting with mixing various greens as I do not paint greenery...at all.  I was quite happy with how the distant mountains turned out. Working from imagination it turns out is much harder than working from real life, at least for me it is!  When I finally did get to go to the Plein Air Workshop I was pleasantly surprised with how my practice of mixing and trying different brush work paid off and I could just focus on what was in front of me and enjoy the day.  I am definitely hooked on plein air painting and hope to do some over the winter as well...when it is not raining that is.

Closed Grisaille - Oil on Panel 8x8" This is the second stage of the sea shell painting I started earlier this week.  The first session I painted the open grisaille which is just a painting completed entirely using very thin layer of an earth color such as burnt umber, burnt sienna or in this case, asphaltum.The toned or white substrate shows through slightly.  I used a flat stiff brush and mineral spirits with the asphaltum to draw out the basic shape of the shell using straight lines and focusing on angles and shapes, trying to not think of the actual object as a shell but as a series of puzzle shapes. Once the open grisaille was dry, I used my premixed tubes of neutral grays to paint the closed grisaille.  The closed grisaille is a painting usually using neutral grays that allows the artist to focus on the value structure without the complexity of color.  I have values pre-mixed and tubed from a value 2 neutral gray to a value 9, titanium white is a valu...

Ocean View - Oil Sketch $95 Framed This is a little oil sketch I did during the summer when I was trying to get ready for an upcoming Plein Air workshop that I signed up for.  I do not usually paint landscapes in oil so it was definitely a challenge but fun to do.  I painted this one in a couple of hours and learned a lot. Plein air painting is really fun because you are trying to figure everything, color, composition, paint handling, in one go in a very short time so it forces you to make faster decisions than you would normally make.  So much fun!

Open Grisaille - Oil on Panel 6x8" well that is what I planned on doing this morning.  I thought I would start with a quick underpainting of a seashell that I have.  I set up the lights and quickly blocked in the angles and shape of the seashell on my panel using diluted asphaltum oil paint with mineral spirits. Then I got sucked in and rather than moving onto the color portion of painting, I ended up painting a very developed underpainting or open grisaille.  Oh well, it was too much fun to stop.  Working from life is so much fun, hard, but fun.   This will give me a chance to mix my paints properly while the first layer dries.  I have several shells that I have collected over the years so I plan to do at least on painting alla prima of a seashell....or many indirect seashell paintings.

Pencil Drawing on Stonehenge Paper in Progress I decided to start a separate blog to document my fine art training that I have been working on.   I just realized that from my commissions blog which I have not updated sinc February that it looks like I have been up to a whole lot of nothing. Not true! I have been studying the classical method of drawing and painting which takes much more time but I think the results are so worth it. The drawing I am currently working on still needs a fair bit more work but it is getting there.  The darks seem to take a lot more time to build up on this paper and using harder pencils.  I intend to do an oil painting of the drawing once it is completed.  Normally I do a very rough sketch or a mock up in photoshop prior to starting a painting.  I decided this time around I really wanted to work out as many issues as possible before I even get to the canvas.  I may also do a monochromatic oil study and then a full color ...