Paul Felix notes #3

These notes were taken from John Nevarez' Unofficial Paul Felix blog

Paul Felix notes #2

These notes were taken from John Nevarez' Unofficial Paul Felix blog

Paul Felix notes #1

These notes were taklen from John Nevarez' Unofficial Paul Felix blog

Watercolor/Ink technique

SECRETS REVEALED! William Stout’s Rackham/Dulac Technique

Some of my most popular pictures are in what I call my Rackham/Dulac style (after two turn-of-the-century children’s illustrators who used this technique extensively, Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac). It dates back a hundred years or so but it’s pretty easy to do. Here’s how:
1) Pencil your picture.
2) Ink your picture with a Hunt crowquill pen, using a 50/50 mixture of waterproof black (India) and sepia inks. That will make your black a nice warm black.
3) After the ink is dry, erase the pencil lines.
4) Mask off your image using white art tape.
5) On your palette, prepare a little pool of raw umber watercolor.
6) Quickly soak the image using a very wet fine-grained sea sponge (or “art sponge”), then wring out the sponge.
7) Using a wide (about three quarters of an inch) Aquarelle watercolor brush, cover your image with the raw umber watercolor.
Using the wringed-out sponge, dab and blot up the raw umber watercolor in the areas of your picture that you want to remain light. You may have to wring out your little sponge several times during this process. Work quickly (and near a sink) before the watercolor dries. This will give your image an antique parchment look. You can also add a little raw umber with a smaller brush (not too small) to the areas you want to be darker.
9) While the picture is still wet you can add and perform any wet-on-wet techniques you care to (I usually do this in the sky areas, adding various colored tints).
10) Let the picture dry a little bit, then start adding layers of transparent watercolor to your piece, slowly building up the color to what you want it to finally be.
11) After your picture has dried, use an eraser if necessary to lighten some of your watercolor.
12) When dry, you’ll notice that sometimes your watercolor has greyed-out some of your black pen lines. Mix up a batch of colored ink (never dyes) appropriate to your color scheme with a lot of water to get a nice PALE transparent wash. Brush this over your picture. It will do two things: It should unite your color scheme and it should also bring back the intensity of most of your pen lines.
13) Sometimes adding a touch of Prismacolor pencils is called for to bring out some highlights (I use the Cream and Sand colors a lot for this), darken some shadows or add some complementary “color sparks” to your picture.
14) Carefully remove the white tape.
15) Retouch with white goauche any unsightly color bleeds if necessary. If you need to pop in any white highlights on your piece, now’s the time.
16) When completely dry, spray the piece with Krylon Crystal Clear acrylic coating. Don’t breathe that stuff — you’ll end up with plastic lungs!

As a result of all this work, you should have a brand new ancient-looking masterpiece!

Good Luck!

William Stout

This post was taken from this blog: LINK

Plein air step-by-step

I photographed the various stages of my plein air painting in Dochamps, Belgium.
The first thing I do is taking a walk, and look around for interesting shapes, lighting, colors structures...anything that gives me a reason or a challenge to start painting. In this case, I was struck by the mosses on the roof of the house, and the tilted horizon, which can cause interesting compositional challenges.

Here's an overview of my setup. For more information on the materials I use and equipment I bring along, check out this previous post: LINK


I start out with a pencilsketch. I use the sketch only to define the placement and sizes of the objects in the composition. I don't take the drawing any further than this. I want to do the rest of the decisionmaking with a brush in my hands. In other words: I want it to be a painting, not a drawing.


I first put a basic (in this case) yellow tone over the complete canvas, to get rid of the pure white of the paper. This white will appear nowhere in the painting. Then I add light washes to define the basics of the color composition.

I now use thicker paint, to apply accents and tonalities.

I start out adding more detail first at the point of interest of the painting. I can decide later on how much detail the background needs to support the subject of teh painting.

More detailing. At this point (which is quite late) I decided to leave out the pole in the front. I made the mistake of waiting too long to add it in the painting, (I should have done that in the very beginning, when I still had the fexibility in the painting to move stuff around , and play with it, to make it work. Now it became a separate object in the painting, that caused the composition to fall apart. At this point I was frustrated because I didn't think of this at the very beginning, which made me forget to take a picture of the moment I put the pole in, and then paint it over again. That would have been an interesting moment to show... I'm sorry about that...;-)

The final painting. Little details in the front, and less detail in the trees left, lead the eye to the house.
The shift in lighting, because clouds getting in front of the sun, and the movement of the sun because time passes, makes painting outdoors extra challenging. Especially at the and of the day, or in the morning when light changes quickly, I lay in the shadows, so I know xectly where they are, even when they changed already.

Howard Pyle notes

This post was taken from this blog.

The great American illustrator, Howard Pyle, taught about two hundred students in his lifetime. Of those, about eighty became well-known artists and illustrators. His assistant for many of those years was Charles DeFeo, whose job it was to clean Pyle's palette, reset it with fresh color, wash the brushes, and take Pyle's French poodle, Bijou for walks. While DeFeo was in the studio, he recorded some of the advice Howard Pyle gave to his class.

First an artist- then an illustrator.

If you are going to be an artist all hell can't stop you. If not, all Heaven can't help you.

If you receive only fifty cents for a job, put as much of your heart into it as you would in one you are receiving $500 for.

If you are doing a black-and-white, a little color will hide a multitude of sins.

If you are painting a sky full of birds, or a garden of flowers, or any objects- show one or a thousand.

If an object in the foreground of your picture looks too big, make it bigger. If it looks too small, make it smaller.

After the first half-hour of work, your lay-in should kill at a hundred yards.


If you can make a picture with two values only, you have a strong and powerful picture. If you use three values, it is still good, but if you use four or more, throw it away.

In using three values he used to say, "Put your white against white, middles tones (groups) against grays, black against black, then black and white where you want your center of interest. This sounds simple, but is difficult to do."

If you're doing a fight picture or a stormy scene make the background fight as well as the figures in the picture.

A strange color, that is different from the color scheme of your painting, use in one spot only. It will be beautiful, but do not repeat it.

They will never shoot you for what you leave out of a picture.

Your picture is finished if it is one-third as good as your original idea.

My favorite of DeFeo's reminiscences of Pyle's class, however, is the comment Pyle would make after giving a painting demonstration: "I'm afraid you didn't get much out of it outside of entertainment for you could see me work, but you could not see me think." Whenever I have witnessed a demonstration by a master painter, I am always left with the frustration of seeing what they did, without knowing WHY they chose to do what they did. For better or worse, I know my style will always have a signature element that is me; I am not seeking to be a copy of another artist (no matter how brilliant they are). If I could only "see how they think," though, perhaps I could approach that master's skill.

John Kascht on caricatures

In this film "Funny Bones" artist John Kascht gives us a behind the scenes look at the creation of his portrait of Conan O' Brien, explaining his artistic process and approach to caricature.