Taeil Kim, the Painting Process

Three short videos by artist Taeil Kim illustrate many of the painting steps we have been talking about in class.

Taeil Kim describes the process in the first video as the sketch, basic values and relating the values.

• He draws the subject with the dark shapes created by the woman's features and hair. He is careful with the placement, but from the first stroke a painting is a process of refining earlier decisions. No decision is locked in.
• He lays in the basic values with large color spots. There is no detail yet.
• He determines the values by relating them to each other and to the background wash.

In the second video, Kim describes the next steps as a refinement of color and value, focus on edge control and detail.

• He continues to assess his color and value decisions, using accurate relationships between values and color of the light, halftone and shadow planes.
• He breaks initial larger color spots into smaller color spots, while preserving the values of the larger masses.
• As he continues to assess the color spots he works on the edges between them, creating a range of hard to soft.
• Detail is left to the last.

Taeil Kim takes us through the entire process of painting a portrait.

• His initial block-in uses shapes more than line. He blocks in the dark shapes of the features and hair. The drawing is reduced to an abstract of only two values, light and dark.
• He begins to add his color spots, again relating value and color. He starts with large masses of light, halftone and shadow.
• Detail is a matter of breaking the larger shapes into smaller shapes, the smaller into even smaller. You can refine this to the point of a finely rendered portrait. In this case, he takes the process of refinement much further than in the example above with very subtle value relationships and soft edges.
• The process from start to finish is fluid. No decision is final. It is open to improvement and refinement.