Tracey Costescu Fine Art

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.

Life Drawing - Francoise Sketch So happy to be back at our life drawing sessions and at our new digs at Port Moody Art Association.  This is from the second session which was a sustained session.  In other words, we have a few warm up poses for 1 minute each and then the model is in the same pose for the rest of the night. I prefer to do portraits so I honed in on her face as I never have time to do a whole figure.  I posted the process shots below.  Each image below represents a 25min sitting. I was surprised to get so much done in the first 25min on the block in...perhaps I should have spent more time but hey, I was excited to get going.  I am really trying to focus on using straight lines only and blocking in the major shapes before moving to the smaller shapes.  As you can see, by the time I got to her lips I had already added too much detail rather than thinking about the larger form.  Her eyes I had just roughed out the socket area as h...

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 ...