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Van Gogh style
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Message
Posted
Van Gogh usually painted with thick strokes of paint, in bright colours. I must admit that your painting doesn't look to be in his style. It's better if you first do a few copies of his own paintings before you do your own original painting based on his style.
Why not copy one of his self portraits? This is one where he'd just cut off his ear and was feeling a bit sorry for himself.
http://www.vangoghgallery.com/catalog/Painting/2116/Self-Portrait-with-Bandaged-Ear-and-Pipe.html
I copied this a couple of years ago. It's not hard to do, because it's a fairly simple painting. Your palette might include cadmium red and yellow, viridian, alizarin crimson, ultramarine. A simple way of painting flesh tones is to just use four colours - cad red, yellow ochre or raw sienna, black and white.
Edited
by keora
Posted
Don't bin it; not yet anyway
What I learned working for the old Midland Bank (now HSBC) is that you never learn to do anything without getting it wrong a few times. It's the same in my music now, and in art.
You'll have learned a lot from making this painting. What you need to figure out is what those lessons are.
Posted
Get back in there with some strong darks, and vibrant lights - it's unresolved, and consists of pastel shades which van Gogh didn't use; no point in being nervous or hesitant if you're going for the van Gogh look, because he piled on the paint, on a thought-out base structure. You can't produce a van Gogh, all any of us are going to be able to do is produce a pastiche, even a cartoon - and it might help if you thought of it like that; just go for it with darks and lights, pay attention to his swirling brush-strokes and the multi-directional strokes as well, remember that he painted generally (in the latter part of his career) in a hot part of the world, and indicated the heat haze by shimmering shapes so that the whole landscape seems to move as you stare at it.
And if that sounds difficult - it is! There have been very few fake van Goghs which fooled experts for long - and not only because the paint analysis gave them away. Van Gogh was unique.
Posted
<div>This van Gogh style is a bit more involved than you may think. Once you examine his work more closely you realise that the direction of brush strokes is important, they don't just swirl around in any old pattern, although you may think that they do, they follow a set path, generally flowing with the scene although he does break this up with a series of horizontal dashes - complicated?, you bet!.
Like Sylvia, I have binned my two attempts that I put on the gallery last week, they just aren't good enough; one of the reasons is that they were painted on too small a canvas, you can't paint a van Gogh on a small canvas, his style and application just doesn't work on a small scale. I am now working on three larger canvasses for the competition and there is a big improvement, it's far less restrictive and more enjoyable.
Robert's suggestions have a sound footing, personally I would ditch the white (well almost) in favour of Naples Yellow Light - much warmer.
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