Here, you see where I have transferred the primary outlines of my sketch onto the painting's surface. I really don't have a set formula for the progression of a painting. Most of the time, I like to paint my foreground figures in first, and then paint in the background (as I'm doing here). By using this method, I can make changes to the figures (like moving an arm or leg, or even a whole figure) without having to worry about what happens to the background.
Due to the hundreds of spectators in the background—and wanting to get that part of the painting behind me—I decided to paint the foreground and background in first. The
foreground (grass) was painted solely by brush, while the background is painted primarily with an airbrush. At this point, I am ready to move on to the main figures in Between the Lines.
Here
is a closeup view of the background crowd. I used acrylic paints with an airbrush to achieve the out-of-focus look. I will go back over some of this acrylic airbrushing using oil glazes applied with a brush in the fine tuning process.
As you see in this picture, I have begun painting the foreground detail.
As I work from background to midground in the painting, the detail will become sharper making the main action of the painting "in focus." The midground detail will look even more "in focus" because as I work from the midground to the foreground, I will gradually blur it, too.
After several hundred hours at the easel, I've just about birthed this baby. However, I still have many hours of fine detail work left before I can call it finished. "Between the Lines."
This close-up of the painting shows Lee Roy Jordan closing in on Jim Grisham, the running back for Oklahoma.
The following are photographs of Daniel Moore's painting, "Between the Lines" in
progress. The narrative is in the artist's own words.
There's a lot of work and thought that go into my paintings before I can break out the oils. One of my old art professors in college said, "Sometimes you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you come up with a workable idea." With me, that still holds true. In Between the Lines, I did extensive
work on the composition of the painting, precisely setting all the figures where I wanted them before arriving at this final preliminary pencil sketch. I'm a firm believer that a painting can only be as good as its composition.