"Movie Star"

I really don't like having to paint from photo but sometimes it's my only option. So I try to find some that are designed well with a good light source, which is a lot harder than I thought it'd be. Sometimes google has TOO much info, that it can be difficult to find what you're looking for. I was happy with this one though because I got too use my palette knife with the earings!

"Patience"

Oh the patience of my wife, I needed a model for a face study so I set up a single light structure and had her sit and watch a show. I've been trying to paint or draw something everyday so sometimes I need to have her help. I really liked the light direction on the face and the palette knife work in her hair, but the neck needs a bit more color.

"Christmas Time"

This was the last model session in figure drawing for the semester, sad. :( But then starts another in one month! The model said my painting study reminded here of christmas time because of the red nose and rosey cheeks. I wanted to just focus on the face and head structure for the session being we only have about 1 hr 45 min after we start and model breaks. The only part I was unsatisfied with was the lip structure which is going to be my upcoming focus.

"Admiration in Contour"

So my next semester of school I will be taking an advanced figure class and a large portion will be in full value charcoal which I don't work on as often as I should. So for my head study this day I sadly set my paints aside and focused on my charcoal skills. I love the contour line drawing left over in the left hand and hair and decided to leave it as is.

"Full Figure"

I don't add many full figures from my class studies to my blog. It's about 1 hr 50 min of time painting. My values improved a lot here, having the complete figure in the light side and still having it turn well. I didn't get to work on the face as much as I would've liked but for being blocked in quick I was satisfied.

"Wannabe Still-Life"

So I'm not confident with my still life at all. My focus lately has been primarily figure and faces.

The part that stands out the most to me is the color scheme; red, yellow, and blue. All very obvious, it gave this study a design feel that I usually struggle with.

"Superman" "Ghost Rider"

I wanted to work more with my pastel recently and had a short period of free time at work. I really enjoy using comic book characters with pastel because of the extreme color you can use and still have it work nicely.

"Elegance"

Here's another daily face I painted a couple weeks ago and am just barely getting it put up now. lol. I've been studying Malcolm Leipki a lot lately to improve on the feminine lips, which I think it has shown already some obvious progress in comparison to past entries.

"1944 - Amsterdam Holland"

This series of small paintings follows a book a friend is making for their family for Christmas . It was about a 2 1/2 week period I had to make them so it really was crunch time. I had lots of fun setting up the models and combining ideas from other pictures. My favorite by far is the farmer carrying the fast-asleep boy, the red blanket really made it dramatic for me and I got to use my permanent red deep straight out of the tube!

"I'm Batman"

So lately I’ve been using pastels for illustrations/studies at work. It’s a little easier clean-up for me and I get less concerned looks from management that something might spill like oils. They’ve actually helped my oil painting in many ways for a couple reasons: First, laying down shapes in place of being nit-picky with a little brush. You have these inch long pastel pieces w/o a sharpened tip and it becomes necessary to choose your battles. Second, with pastel you can over exaggerate your color and it still fits. I love that about pastels! And third, I love mixing, but with oils it’s easy to get in the habit of mushing your paints on the canvas and not being confident with the color and stroke. With pastels it becomes harder to lay color on color on color. So I’ll choose my shape and color from the start.

"Nice Back!"

The light came out perfect on the model’s back, I got positioned began my painting. So sometimes I zone out completely listening to music and lose track of time and breaks. It was coming out nicely, very finished for a study. Then I saw everyone getting up and so I removed your headphones and caught the end of Rob’s sentence, “Before you leave. . .” I assumed class was over and cleaned up. Before I realized it, I had only been painting for an hour and ten or fifteen minutes! There were a couple things I fixed after, but I felt I captured the moment pretty well in the short time frame.

"Youngin' "

Come this head study, I learned quickly why it is so important to do some kind of painting or drawing everyday or close to it. I couldn’t get the features correct, it just wasn’t working. So I scraped it and started over. After that, it was a piece of cake. I realized that if I wasn’t working so hard to get these small studies done so often and just painting in class. There would be no opportunity to run into these problems and work through them until a time comes when it’s too late.

"Creeper Girl"

With my practice heads most the shadow sides of the faces have been cold with a warm light side. So for this one I had to search for a “vampire-like” face with a warm shadow/cold light side. Then learn to paint opposite of what I’m accustomed to so as to not get stuck in a rut. :)

"Emotion"

Working on emotion! This is so difficult, the position of any facial feature can change everything. :s These photos of the painting studies did not come out as well as I would've liked. The woman caught a huge reflection of light on the bridge of her nose and the man has flecks of light throughout the shadow area. Either way, the worn and beaten look came out pretty well on both. I struggled with the woman in looking down and not so much tired. The man I added tons of color and loved it!

For my birthday this weekend I received a 18' X 5' roll of canvas!!! More than I could've asked for, it'll last me a good while and I'll get a lot of practice gluing and streching my own canvas. :)

"Paint by Day"

So I pulled out a large canvas from when I was looking to paint one head a day and noticed a huge improvement form one year ago! The missionary looking head is from summer 2009 and the other two are from Wednesday, Sept. 29th and today. I'm dedicating about an hour and a half to two hours to each one of these , focusing on speed an and choosing large shapes of color. I started picking out the differences in style, paint quality, and composition. It's nice to see the artist in me begin to pull everything together! :)

"Our Lord and Savior"

I love this painting of Christ, the original is done by Ted Henniger, an amazing painter by the way. It isn't in print anymore and I wanted to purchase it for my home decor, so instead I decided to recreate from a photo of the original. I took this as an opportunity to add more color and paint with my style of brushwork, putting a lot of palette knife work into the beard and highlights on the forehead. It took me about a week, a total of 24 hours. Definitely better than I expected.

"My Love"

This is the largest peice I have painted to date. It took a huge amount of work, more than anticipated. lol My focus is still figure, I set up the lighting myself and tried to draw the focus to her face. There's a whole array of colors in her face which I had tons of fun painting and trying to keep them in harmony with one another. I would've liked to see the backround painted a little more loosely and less glazing necessary, but it's coming along nicely.

"Argh Matie!"

My huge gap in postings is mostly due to marrying the perfect woman. :) This portrait study was going to be a full figure of the model in a pirate costume but the "likeness" of the model in my work has been lacking and I wanted to focus more on just the head for a time. It was a short session and I would've liked to have some more time to work on it, but que sera' sera'.

"The Dark Lord"

All Hail! :) This costume was something to see. This even contained wire and tube modeling as if there was a breathing mechanism inside. I bit off a lot more then I could chew this time on purpose. I brought a larger canvas board to cover, but with the same amount of time to accomplish the study as the Gandalf. I loved it the whole time, most of my classmates were humming StarWars during the 2 hours. I need to work on my folds in clothing is something I found out here, the cape was definately a struggle.

"White Wizard"

What an opportunity! This model designs his own costums and this one represents Gandalf. I only wish we had more time to paint, after setup and breaks it came to be about 1 hr and 40 min - 2 hrs paint time. Either way I'm getting more of the figure down and the canvas covered. His beard actually came out be the easiest part, good ol' palette knife. Next week he'll be coming as Darth Vader, I can't wait to see it!

"Head Full of Color"

I haven't posted anything for a long while. :( With getting married and everything my brains are scrambled with things to do. I'm also working on a huge 18 x 24 peice that is almost finished and I will post later. This was probably the fastest study of a head I've done. I love the color I've been able to put into the face and it has great shape, but a little more time would've been nice.

"Back in the Day"

I loved this girl's bright pink bonnet and was so sad when I didn't have time to finish detailing it. This was another 2 hours and 20 minutes session and I focused primarily on the face and getting the white backround all covered. My figure and faces are following a trend of being too cold so my next focus is going to be to put more oranges, reds, and yellows in my flesh tones so that I can have variety in my work. Let me know what you think!

"Live to Ride"

So I had about 2 hours and 20 minutes to get most of this painting done, or at least the feel of it. The model came decked out in his motorcycle gear and it was awesome to paint, but A LOT of work! It came out okay for such a short time span and doing palette knife work in the motorcycle frame helped cover some ground quickly. It was a good experience to try and paint so much, so quickly and still get decent composition.

"No Name Band"

The goal with my painting here was to combine 3 separate photos with different environments and make them similar in value and color. I chose 3 concerts of 3 different bands; can you guess who the 2 singers are? The hardest part was the stage lighting in the top right, does anyone have tips on painting spot lights and their direction?