Painting a Volcano

Painting a Volcano

(I didn't included my friends name or picture of her 

since she is not comfortable with that)

  

A friend of mine called me to tell me she had to get a set painted really quickly because the play it is for was in about a week and a half.  Anybody who has painted sets before knows that a week and a half is not normally enough time for painting a set.  It takes a long time to cover that much surface. I was really grateful that for a change I was not booked back to back on a Saturday so I said yes I would come out and help that day.

I asked her what the scene was and she said that it was set in Hades. She then told me a little bit about the play which sounded interesting. I had never heard of this play before which I guess is not very suprising since I am sure there are a great number of plays out there that I have not heard about before.  She then asked if I had ever painted fire, lava or volcanoes before. I had to laugh because I have done a far amount of landscape work in the past but I had only lightly touched fire and never done any work on lava or volcanoes. 

So I looked around to see if anyone had done a tutorial or demo on that kind of work.  I found a couple of artists. The artists work I liked best is called Robert Thomas.  In the videos I saw he talked about his work and why he does it while he worked on some pieces of art. The videos that was taken were done at a fabulous angle for seeing his brush stroke technique, how much paint he uses on his brushes, the types of brushes and how he applies his paints.

It was eye opening for me as I watched all of these things. I love blending and shading and often have a hard time with art that goes directly from one color to the other with no blending when it is not a stylized piece of work.  However when I saw him do this in combination with how he applied his paint and created the picture I was in awe of how it worked. His lines and the not subtle changes in color in places was wonderful, it added to the beauty and quality rather than detracted from the piece.

I watched his videos a few times till I thought I could imitate his style enough considering the deadline ahead.  When it came to application I had few difficulties because of my natural tendencies in my rendering.  At first I was very conscious of going against my normal techniques and styles. Then after a while I slipped back in to my habits of bending colors slowly. 

When my friend and I stepped back there were some problems.  It was very clear there were two different artists who had done it. The parts of the set where I had not blended it looked like it could be the same artist but where I hadn’t restrained my need to blend it looked very different. What was worse it didn’t look as much like lava.  My friend who did not have these tendencies or habits didn’t have to change anything.   So I had to swallow my pride and admit that just because I like certain techniques doesn’t mean they are always best and I needed to bow the style of the artist I had found and liked; that truly knows how to represent volcanoes so well.

I went back in and fixed it. At the end it looked like it could be done by the same artist and looked well put together.  I had a good laugh at myself with my friend which I think can be very helpful when any artist is trying to learn from their mistakes. Otherwise mistakes as an artist can eat at you like disease can the body.