In the Old Fashioned Way… Plus Smoke

SMOKY OLD FASHIONED is a recent commission piece, something I love doing, especially when it’s for a gift or something sentimental. In this instance, the painting is for a gift for someone who apparently has everything. Painting to the rescue! 

My process for custom work involves a number of preliminary discussions followed by sketches that give compositional options. Just like blocking in the value structure of the actual painting is key to a good outcome, with a custom piece, coming to an agreement on the core elements and structure of the composition is vital. 

I’ve painted a number of libation-based still life compositions, but nothing with smoke. It required me to investigate if painting smoke was similar to creating fog, mist, or larger fire-based plumes.

The answer, it turns out, was an emphatic NO! It seems that once you pump smoke into a cocktail glass, weird shit happens and it becomes lifelike and animated. Looking at reference photos further complicates matters, introducing possibilities of upward windy smoky tendrils, or smoky bits that spill over the edge toward the table. Come to discover both of these considerations are smoked red herrings! Smoky tendrils are “fresh” burning anomalies, and the only smoke that sinks seems to be dry ice based smoke, which you can imagine is in a lot of cocktail glamour shots. 

The trick with this piece was clearly… smoke! But before getting to that challenge, there was the issue of compositional tension. Technically, an Old Fashioned isn’t so much a cocktail as an origins story of composition. The Meehan’s Bartending Guide, my personal true North for all things cocktail, notes “the cocktail was first defined on May 6, 1806, in The Balance and Columbian Repository as ‘a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters’. By the time it showed up in a professional bar manual for the first time in Theodore Proulx’s 1888 The Bartender’s Manual, it was already “old-fashioned”.” My personal preference is rye whiskey, simple syrup, bitters, 1 cherry and an orange twist. Now back to the painting…

The request for this piece was to incorporate Luxardo cherries, orange peel, and a large round ice cube. Figuring out how best to structure this as a piece of art was trickier than I thought, even without the smoke. Once you put all that stuff into a lowball glass, it’s impossible to not notice the tension of so many things jammed into a small space. To tackle this problem we simply talked through various sketches that presented different solutions, and we ultimately landed on cherries on a toothpick, angled into the glass, orange peel also on the toothpick but above the whiskey line, and lastly a demotion of the round ice to the background. As a pleasant surprise, once the smoke was added, it significantly improved the compositional structure because it broadened the view and seems to have further reduced the tension, essentially granting the viewer a larger viewing room. 

Lastly, the smoke technique. I still need to refine the approach, so stay tuned for more smoky cocktails, but the core approach seems sound. The smoke is not white, that’s the first thing. Turns out it’s about 20 variations of gray, leaning warm (cad yellow deep) above the glass, and a little cool (lemon yellow) below the rim. The brushwork boils down to a lot of push and pull between the light grays and the black background, using a lot of scumbling with an oversized round brush. As the smoke expands above the glass, it was important to make sure there was a very thin layer on the outside edges of the core smoke to lend it a sense of movement. The person who commissioned this piece has a cocktail smoker top, which sits on the top of the glass and is then pulled off in a flourish when the smoking is done, which pulls some of the smoke up and out of the glass. It’s all very entertaining, until you try to paint it!