Thursday, March 15, 2018

Knicks Game at Madison Square Garden

There are so many things in motion on and off the court in an NBA game that it kind of boggles the mind to translate it into paint.


(link to video on Facebook) As you can see in the video, I try to use the brush systematically to paint similar objects with a given paint mixture, so I'm not mixing and painting every spot.

Here again, I'm starting the sketch from life and finishing it later from a variety of references, including photos and videos. Even playing a sound recording of the game gets my head back into my memories.

Knicks game, Madison Square Garden, gouache
With a vignette like this I wanted to gradate the picture to the white of the page at the edges. I arbitrarily lightened it with cool colors on the right and warm colors on the left.
-----
Check out the whole blog series:

10 comments:

  1. Thank you. It's wonderful to see a demo of live painting of such an active scene.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm astounded and amazed at the quality and "gesture" of these notebook small paintings... I suspect that this is probably a paying gig for you... I want to see more... where's the tip jar???

    ReplyDelete
  3. This is all great --
    But I especially love the motion blur/ after image on the ball.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Really enjoying this series. I used to eat up this type of illustration when I was in college (early 1980s) from illustrators like Paul Calle, Bernie Fuchs, David Grove, Robeet Heindel and others. Most of them were moving on to more fine art venues at the time. It is nice to see this type of reporting again, hope it catches on in different venues.

    ReplyDelete
  5. this is amazing - glad to see how you did this.

    ReplyDelete
  6. The way you threw that dark tone into the far stands at the start of the process...fearless! It would be nice if you could save the genre from Leroy Neiman. There I said it.

    ReplyDelete
  7. This one is really on point. Absolutely love it. Let's get you courtside for the next painting.

    ReplyDelete
  8. ScottT Thanks, I know what you mean.

    Dan, Actually I had clearance to watch the game from court-side but they gave me and my son good seats in the stands, so I opted for the wider view.

    Arturo, Thanks for asking. There's actually is a Tip Jar button on the left side of the blog.

    Glenn, My dad didn't subscribe to Sports Illustrated, so I missed a lot of those guys, but I'm loving learning about them now.

    Daroo, Glad you noticed that.

    ReplyDelete
  9. WOW James! I'm always impressed by your work, but this one is really amazing. So much going on visually in this piece. For you to be able to distill it down, capture the players, the mass of people, the court and it's reflections, AND nail the perspective, all while being under the gun of the camera....nothing but amazing!

    ReplyDelete

Due to a high level of spam we must moderate comments. Please identify yourself by name or social media handle so we know you're not a 'bot.'