Lipking Workshop Pics

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 Loading ... OK here they are!!  This is Jeremy Lipking’s painting as he developed it over 2 days - pics are 20 mins to 1 hr apart, and I am a terrible photographer with just a consumer grade camera, so shoot me.  There were lots of breaks and a late start on the first day - he has about 9 hours in this one I would estimate.

Here is his easel and model stand.  The model stand is about 18 inches off the ground.  The model bounced all up and down it without killing herself and for that alone I admire her.  She is lit by a Kino Lanp. The studio is lit bu 2 10-light banks of fluorescents about 12 feet up, softened with scrims that dangle about 18 inches.  There is no direct task lighting, but the lighting is good.  I think I will steal that for my studio - except the Kino light which is like $1000.

Hi palette: titanium white, lemon yellow, cad yellow, cad orange, cad red, alizarin crimson, burnt sienna, ultramarine blue, cobalt blue, viridian, golden green (winsor newton), ivory black.  At the bottom he mixes a mother pile of white + ultra blue + alizarin and this shows up in a lot of his mixtures.

He sat right in front of the model and painted the whole time.  He answered questions but seems to be a pretty quiet person by nature.  He did explain his start, which is shown below.

Here is our handsome group of folks.  There were 14 of us I think.  It was pretty tight.  I didn’t knock over anything.

This is the layout.  If you look closely, you see that he has marked off vertical and horizontal golden mean ratios and has placed the head at one of these.  He has some nifty brass golden mean calipers and I wish I had a pic of them.  Darn.  He measures out a head length, then figures out how many heads wide and tall the composition will be.  Then indicates a midline for the figure and perhaps a couple landmarks and long curves for other stuff in the composition.  AND THAT’S IT. 

Day 1 was just the head.  The head starts by laying in big approximate shapes for the background, light and dark planes, and hair with MS thinned paint. The light was burnt sienna + ultramarine blue + titanium white.  The dark was aliz + viridian and possibly some other stuff I couldn’t tell.  From those two large piles of light and dark flesh tones, he employs an open palette to modulate and model the planes of the face and transitions.  This is all wet in wet with thicker paint over the wash, using a “Schmid medium” of stand oil, damar, and turp.

A little farther in.

More or less working from top to bottom, he uses these soft sable langnickle badger brushes.  If you go to his workshop - use those brushes.  They’re a large part of the effect he’s getting, pushing wet paint around and keeping everything very soft.  BTW, he says he is “unconcerned with the likeness” and is only trying to make a good painting.  It is a very nice painting, and looks nothing like her. 

More modeling, down to the lips.  He identifies a midpoint for the lips first.  Because he’s using an open palette, all values are judged against each other *on the palette* and not against the model.  Note the lightness of the shadow accents in the lips.  I looked at his other paintings on the walls and that’s a cool Lipkingism - pushing the shadow accents up a value step or so.

Another thing I noticed was that his shadows are almost as thick as the lights.  His painting always looks almost done, btw, which is nice.

Now we are starting day 2 (above).  He starts by washing in some background around the figure using mineral spirits.  All this washing helps keeps the edges nice n loose.

Completed 1/2 torso washin.  Notice that he laid in some of the green and purple in the shawl here so he’d be able to judge the strong colors against the flesh colors.  Smart!  i didn’t do that, and washed out 1/2 my background comp. 

Then modeling.  Then moving down to the next section of torso.

And more modeling. 

And still more.  Pretty yes?

And the completed sketch, or as much as we got to see it completed.

And a closeup for you.