"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. :)