"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.