August "Whats on your workbench?"

John Lawrence

Active member
I showed everyone an unfinished wood duck a few months ago. Well he's done. This scolding wood duck is white cedar , hollow and painted in oils. These pictures were taken with a cell phone so the quality isn't the greatest.

View attachment July wood duck 4.jpg

And a here is a shot of the head.

View attachment July wood duck 7.jpg

And a shot of the back.

View attachment large woodie back 2.jpg

And this is the whole view of the back.

View attachment large woodie back.jpg

Currently I'm painting a sleeping drake mallard that will probably go hunting with me this fall and I'm carving a drake greater scaup. I just cut out a pair of gadwalls also.

So what have you been working on this month?
 
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John, I love that wooduck! Your passion for this artform can clearly be seen in your work. Thanks for showing...

I'll take a picture of a black duck I am painting soon.


Zach
 
Ruddy in cork, pine head and keel, poplar tail. Oils. Also just cut out a mallard and a black, finishing up a hen scaup.
ruddy.jpg

 
Thank you gentlemen. I have been exchanging messages with another fellow on this forum discussing whether anyone would be interested in a more detailed description of how I paint. Methods, materials and thought process. I also wrote a very detailed article about the pair of Labrador ducks I made a few months back that was shortened for the Hunting and Fishing Collectibles article in the July/August issue. Do you think the forum members would be interested in something more involved?
 
Thank you gentlemen. I have been exchanging messages with another fellow on this forum discussing whether anyone would be interested in a more detailed description of how I paint. Methods, materials and thought process. I also wrote a very detailed article about the pair of Labrador ducks I made a few months back that was shortened for the Hunting and Fishing Collectibles article in the July/August issue. Do you think the forum members would be interested in something more involved?
I'll speak for EVERYONE here.............YES YES YES.

and, THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!

love the woodrow mr. john!

-justin
 
Yes John. That mallard and Ringer will need some clothes soon and I have no idea where to start.

Pat: I’m always in awe of your work. Not just the beauty, (which they are) but the sheer quantity that you put out. Wow.

Bill: I’d love to see the Rudy, but instead I just see the little box with the red “x”. Probably on my end though.
Mike
 
I would certainly be interested in a more detailed description of your work JL!!

Sorry MC, Can anybody else not see my picture?
 
Thanks for the offer John!!
I've been too busy to carve or paint since the warm weather hit. It amazes me how much
little things can change the end result or improve the process. If I could glean a couple things
from you I'll only be 999 hours away from a decent paint job.
Thanks again for the offer, John
 
absolutely John. I struggle with painting. I would like to paint in oils, but have never been happy with the results I get, so for now I'm using acrylics.
 
Please file my response as an unconditional YES! I would very much like to see how you make such Magic.

Scott
 
Okay guys, what I'll do is give you a quick rundown of how I painted the head on the woodie. But it will have to wait till tomorrow because I have to go to work and I won't be back until about 9:00 tonight.

What I'm going to show you will be a mallard head "pre-painted" in the grisaille method ready to be over glazed.

Since you'll be painting a mallard here right soon Colonel Chase you can use that photo to help. So until Monday, everyone have a great day.
 
All right gentlemen, the following is a basic breakdown of how I painted the scolding wood duck head. Let me start with this, I've painted many wood duck in the nearly thirty years that I have been making decoys. I've probably made more wood ducks than anything else, green wings could be a very close second though. After a while though I started looking for new ways to depict the colors rather than cranking out the same thing over and over again.

Now I'm going to get a little out there in this next part, and if you have a problem with somebody viewing decoys as art don't read anymore. But if you can view carved birds as another form of art then continue on. In 2007/08 Dale Chihuly, the world famous Art Glass maker and founder of the Seattle School of Art Glass, had an exhibit at the Phipps Conservatory here in Pittsburgh. At the time I believe this was only the eighth such exhibit he had done. Usually these are held in some fantastic setting and he had the glass artists who work for him create around 2000 new pieces for that installation. And believe it or not I went, twice, the first time in November 2007 during the day, and the second in February 2008 during the last week of the show at night. Seriously people travel from all over the world to see these exhibitions and we had to wait for about six weeks to get tickets the first time and we scored tickets for the final week the day we were at Phipps in November. Attendance broke all kinds of records. The colors Chihuly uses in the glass are indescribable. And being a little out there when it comes to art all I could see were the shapes of birds reflected in the forms and colors. Wood ducks in particular. Those two trips fueled my painting of wood ducks for the past two and half years. And thats where I started with this wood duck.

I carved this wood duck in a scolding pose so my thought with the colors was to show him all lit up with the idea that he is agitated. So that meant some more vibrant colors, but on the other hand I still wanted to keep him dark because that's the way I like to paint.

The first steps after carving and sealing were to lay down two coats of a good oil based primer. I use Behr oil primer, it's slow drying and finishes with good tooth. After a cure out time of about two days I blocked in the basic color outlay on the whole decoy and I just used some leftover green of some kind on the head. I paint tail to bill so the head was the last part to be completed. When I was ready I used a basic grisialle method of shading using a warm black made up from some Burnt Umber, Ultra Marine Blue and a little Ivory Black for the base color. The white highlights were just Unbleached Titanium soft blended into the darker areas with a Loew and Cornell Series 7200 10/0 micro fan blender. If you aren't using one of these run out to your local Michaels and buy some. I'll challenge anyone's airbrush with one.

I didn't take any photos of the wood duck in process but I do have a couple of photos of a sleeping mallard's head that I'm painting currently that is in the same stage as I just described. The photos are not the greatest, I had to use a cell phone, but you can see the basic idea behind them.

View attachment sleeping mallard 1.jpg

View attachment sleeping mallard 1.jpg



View attachment sleeping mallard 2.jpg


After laying in the pattern for highlights and shadows on the wood duck I let it rest for about two days before I started the over glazing. Before I go on I think it's important to explain a little theory about painting in oils. The most important concept you have to grasp is, and I saw Steve Froehlich use this phrase on another web page, is opacity and transparency. What that means is some paint layers will not let light or other colors pass through, and some layers will let light and colors pass through and therefore be influenced by them. If you are still with me the process I used was to lay down transparent glazes over the shadows and highlights of the basic black, white and gray of the base head painting. I did four paint sessions over the course of about a week to get the color you see in this photo.

View attachment July wood duck 7.jpg

The greens were built with succesive glazes of Thalo Yellow Green, Thalo Green Yellow shade, Thalo Green and some Naples Yellow for the extreme highlights. Towards the back of the crest I mixed in a little Ivory Black to the Thalo Green to get a darker background for the white "slash" feathers.

For the purples I used Diox Purple, Cobalt Violet Hue, Magenta, and I mixed a lot of varing hues of purple with Ultra Marine Blue and Rose Madder. If you notice the highlight of yellow just at the rear of the purple "comet" behind the eye I used just the smallest amount of Cadmium Yellow Deep Hue.

For the blues I used Ultra Marine Blue and Thalo Blue.

For the white "saddle" under the chin my base color was Unbleached Titanium highlighted with a mix of Unbleached Titanium and Flake White. A little word of caution about using Flake Whites, they contain Lead Carbonate, that's the famous "white lead" you read about from antique decoy days and require a little more care for disposal.

I fell that a key technique in my process is to use a fairly fine brush to add the paint colors to the spot being painted and the use the Loew and Cornell Series 7200 10/0 blender to bring the colors together. When doing this you only want to use the last fifth or sixth of the bristles. A very soft touch is essential.

One new technique that I used on this wood duck was to try and eliminate the use of white as a highlight in the more vibrantly colored areas such as the tail, flanks, back, head and breast. I was trying to think of new color combinations to make this decoy different than ones I've painted previously. I did have to use white in a few areas though as I could quite solve that equation this time. But that leaves me a challenge for the future.

This sounds real complicated, but the actual painting process wasn't nearly so. It just takes a lot of words to describe something that only takes a few minutes to do.

So here it is, if you have any questions ask away.
 
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Mike,

When I over glaze in transparent oils the colors, the paint brand and how powerful I want that color to appear dictate how thick (or viscous) the paint mix is. Sometimes I just want to "bump" the color to warmer or cooler. Sometimes I'm looking to darken the whole effect. And so on.

When you start to explore oil painting I believe one of the best things you can do is try different brands of paint. You'll find a range of colors and consistency even in colors who have the same name between the different company's. Or on the other hand one company, like Grumbachers, can have several colors that are basically the same but cover and paint complete differently.

Without getting real technical as to what pigments and such are used I'll tell you that I have three different tubes of black Grumbachers on my table right now. I have Mars Black which for me is an absolute black and is very powerful in it's "hide" capability. I have Ivory Black which I see as a softer black in color and in a lot of aspects is semi-transparent so it's not as powerful in it's "hide". And then I have Lamp Black, which in my eyes finishes to a more cool dead black, and that color is somewhere in the middle of the other two as to "hide". I also have several other paint company's blacks that I use on occasion for different effects.

So to summarize the correct answer would really be it depends. At times very thin, at others much thicker, and everywhere in between.

Hope this helps.
 
John L: Very nice of you to share some of your techniques. I like the results of your approach to painting. Having come from an acrylics background it seems to me the "glazes" you use are similar to "washes" that a lot of the acrylic painters use except in your case the glazes are sometimes a lot thicker than a wash. In any case, when you thin the paint for glazing do you use a conventional thinner ( mineral spirits, turpentine) or one of the so called "mediums" such as Grumbacher #1 or Liquin.
 
John,

There are certain things that I'm going to keep to myself. The use of mediums is key to individualism in oils in my experience. I will tell you that I do, and I use more than one.

And I encourage you and everyone else to go out and experiment with oils and mediums to see what works for you.
 
John L. Thanks for the quick response. Your approach is quite different from what Keith Mueller teaches in his book and classes. He uses a "grisaille" basecoat but then does a lot of wet-on-wet blending of paint that is essentially out-of-the-tube with no mediums or thinners. That's the neat thing about oil paints--they give you a lot of flexibility to try different approaches.

Will you be showing more of the mallard head as you proceed or is what you've shown as far as you want to go with the tutorial? JJ
 
John.

I did my first glaze on the mallard head this morning and I'm going to let it rest for a couple of days. I am by no means a techno wiz and frequently rely on Mama Volleyduck to help transfer photos to the computer and she is out of town until Wednesday night. So if you would like I'll get a photo in two days and show you where I'm at before the next glaze., There is an upside to "Baching it" though. I get to eat what I like for dinner and tonight it's pepperoni pizza with thick crust and banana peppers.

And once again I don't want to scare anyone off but I in part developed my technique of painting by reading about classical artists and the techniques they employed. The multiple thin layers or glazes of paint was one that Leonardo DiVinci used believe it or not. If you look you can find inspiration in a lot of places.

What is everyone else doing this fine August?
 
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