Stage 20 of Old McDonald: Final

Finished left hand.
Painted final layer in background and darkest shadow areas for contrast and clean up.

Stage 19 of Old McDonald

Final touches to red cloth finished.
Left hand near completion.

Stage 18 of Old McDonald

A lot more work on hands. Right hand near completion.
Beginning to put final layer of Cadmium Red in highlights and Viridian Hue in shadows of red cloth, hair and beard. Also completing final touches and fixes throughout.

Stage 17 of Old McDonald

A lot of work on arms and hands. Both arms near completion.

Stage 16 of Old McDonald

White cloth completed.
Hair and beard complete excluding final tuning.
A lot more work on hands and arms.

Stage 15 of Old McDonald

White cloth and hair/beard close to completion. Beginning to blend beard and face. More work on the arms. Both hands formed and beginning to establish details in each.

Stage 14 of Old McDonald

White cloth close to final tuning stage.
More work on hair and beard.
More work on arms.

Stage 13 of Old McDonald

More work on building up hair and beard. A little work on the right arm.
Started working on white cloth. Colorwise, I treated the white cloth like extremely pale skin. I primarily used Titanium White but added very small amounts of Yellow Ochre for tint and treated the shadows like skin shadows.

Stage 12 of Old McDonald

More work on the arms. Starting to define right hand.
I’ve also started working on the beard and hair. I used Cadmium Red for the base and Viridian Hue in the dark areas and to define strands.

Stage 11 of Old McDonald

Torso and leg completed excluding final tuning and balancing.
I begin focusing on the arms and alternate between arms as I work.

Stage 10 of Old McDonald

More work on the torso.

Stage 9 of Old McDonald

Building up layers of the torso.
Starting to define arms.

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.

Stages 1-4 of Old McDonald

Stage 4

For Stage 4, all the red elements are painted in Cadmium Red. The
white cloth in Titanium White. The face in Titanium White and Payne’s Gray. The rest of the flesh is a mixture of Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Red, and Titanium White.

Stage 3
For Stage 3, I used a mixture of one part Alizarin Crimson, one part Burnt Umber, one part Ultramarine Blue, and three parts Payne’s Gray to paint in another transparent layer over the previous Alizarin Crimson one.

Stage 2

For Stage 2, I painted a transparent layer of oil Alizarin Crimson over my base layer of acrylic Ultramarine Blue. In most cases all I needed to do was paint directly over the Blue, but there were some areas in the lower right hand corner that were off, so I needed to paint them in the proper place. Like Stage 1, the focus of these first transparent layer stages is establishing values and not details.

Stage 1: Projection

For Stage 1, I first printed a black and white version of my source image and used that to project my composition onto my canvas. I used Ultramarine Blue acrylic paint to establish forms and values.