Stages 5-8 of Old McDonald

Stage 8
For Stage 8, I’ve cleaned up the Happy Meal Handle and added the smile. I’ve also begun working on the torso and exposed leg. I began working on those elements by first painting a mixture of one part Ultramarine Blue, one part Burnt Umber, and two parts Payne’s Gray in all the shadow areas. I then added white to some of my previously mixed orange and painted that in the lighter areas of the torso and leg. I continued working on the leg by adding more red to better color match.





Stage 7

With the red cloth to my liking, my focus shifted to the Happy Meal.
For the Happy Meal box, I used the same colors and blending method used for the red cloth. The box face appears brighter because no green contaminated the purity of the red like it did in all of the red cloth. The handle is Cadmium Yellow Hue. I also painted a faint reflection of the handle in the box with Cadmium Yellow Hue. Finally, I used Titanium White and Payne’s Gray to reestablish some folds of the white cloth.






Stage 6

Starting with Stage 6, I began working on the red cloth and Happy Meal.
I started by first painting a mixture of two parts Viridian Hue and one part Payne’s Gray in all the shadows of the red cloth. I then broke the element of the red cloth into three parts: the section around and below the Happy Meal, the areas around the exposed leg, and the section below the torso in the lower right quadrant. Following the background to foreground rule, I began painting in a thicker layer of Cadmium Red in the brightest areas of cloth. I then blended that layer with the shadows to correctly achieve my tones. The image for Stage 6 has only most of the Happy Meal section completed in this fashion. I continued this process until I had made my way across the canvas and finished with the section below the torso.


Stage 5

I like to follow a general rule of working my compositions from the background to the foreground. This helps in creating depth, especially for overlapping objects. Paint whatever is supposed to appear farthest away first and work the composition forward to the closest elements. I kind of broke that rule in my Stage 5 by starting with the face, which is closer than the red cloth behind the Happy Meal, but I wanted to establish the face earlier on to gauge what my final product would look like. I also did it because I planned on stretching the rule throughout the whole piece by completing elements based on their base color, but working those elements from back to front. For the face I only used Titanium White and Payne’s Gray.