Concept

In the following Making Of, I will describe the main tools and techniques employed to produce the painting "Repair Shop".

I am constantly trying to improve my workflow by experimenting with new techniques and approaches to a painting. Here, this was also the case. Usually, I start by painting with large textured brushes without having a clear idea of what I want to portray. During this process, forms start to emerge and from there I develop the image. However, in this case I tried to imagine in my head what I wanted to paint. I also wrote down several keywords to further assist this mental process. For this one some of the topics were: "future, mechanic, retro, under machine, crowded, dark, etc" (Fig.01).


The mental image I had was more or less what you can see in Fig.01: a black and white image mainly consisting of silhouettes. This concept was painted in Corel Painter and I started with a new 1500px high canvas. Using the Square Chalk brush and the Palette Knife I laid down large gestural brushstrokes on a white canvas. Two suggestions here:

Create your own Paper to interact with the Chalk brush; don't limit yourself to the default one because it's quite small and repetitive and instead create a large canvas with a lot of different textures (Fig.02 & Fig.03)

Change the default Angle behavior of the Palette Knife to Bearing as it will produce much more interesting brushstrokes