I was surprised late last night by the sound of birds chirping – it was already 5:30 a.m.! Time flies when I’m hooked on a project. I couldn’t figure out what to do with my hands (I’m the guy in the center), and finally choose to hold some Eucharist props – they aren’t needed, but at least they don’t seem out of place. My original idea was to give bunny ears to the girls on either side of me. It would have been silly, ridiculous, trivial…which is why I loved the idea. However, I think it would have detracted too much from Jesus, who should be the center.

My sketch was pretty much done and I wanted to skip ahead to the part where I get to play with the colors, so today I started the under-painting. I haven’t consistently done this stage, in some of my earliest paintings, I just put a dark brown, a flesh tone and a white together in three stripes, and then blended them into a tight form. This works great, but somehow I’ve lost that confidence which comes with inexperience. Now I feel I have to do it the “right” way, which, for oil painting, is lots of layers.

Before I started painting I outlined my drawing with a permanent black marker, another stage I usually skip. Traditionally, painters would transfer the sketch from paper and then outline it with a bit of turpentine + brown pigment, so that they could see the lines through the layers of paint. This takes forever… so I’ve been skipping it. The problem becomes, by the time you get to the important details, you’re already on top of several layers of paint and often you can’t see your meticulously drawn lines anymore. I kind of feel like I’m cheating, but I think if Leonardo Da Vinci could have used a black Sharpie pen, he would have.

I filled in the background with a light brown – background color should be in between your lights and darks so that your foreground stands out and has sharp contrast. However, I can already tell that this blank flat background, which I can pull off in a small symbolic piece or portrait, isn’t going to work for this painting. I’m going for realism, so I’m going to have to put something behind them to suggest a context or location.

I think it looks pretty good so far. I’ll change the altar to brown – it seemed to boring so I tried the blue, but anything but brown is going to seem strange. If I make it a little brown I can pull of a rough linen look. I’ll have to make the tablecloth longer also, to cover where everyone’s feet should be. Now comes the tough part: I want the 12 guests to be pretty dark, shadowy, sharp contrast with bright faces, and Jesus to be very detailed, and much lighter so that he really glows and stands out as the obvious focus and center. This means I’ll have to make the background darker, too. All in all, I’m surprised at how fast its going. I’ve been avoiding this painting for at least a year because I thought it would be too difficult. Can’t wait to finish!