Back from the dead

Sorry. I will do better. I can't do anything in regards to the picture quality yet. I'm workin on it. These are still cell phone pics.


All of the figures are done from life with lots of palette knife work. I wish I could rotate them for you...sorry guess you'll just have to turn your head sideways. I'm pretty happy with how I'm handling color these days. It's been a real fight through this smester but some things have really started to sink in. One of my finals is in this post but the quality of the image is so bad you can't see the major improvements. I will be putting up a post next week using better images...I think I figured out how to do it. Stooopid library kompewters. Anyway, enough griping. The major thing I've learned is that it is a very bad policy to modify edges on your brush strokes with impunity. It isn't that it will create too many soft edges, it's that the colors it creates are muddy and boring. Muddy is the word for this semester. Richard Schmid calls that range of boring brown/neutrals, muckledy-dumb brown. I have found that I can create much more interesting transitiions and a better sense of form by tiling or placing clear storkes of clean color next to each other. That's part of the reason I resort to using palette knives. It is also the reason behind people advising me to work larger all the time. It gives you room to make those transitions without blending. Of course, I thought I knew all of that and understood it though I still wasn't doing it. I think I have come a long way toward applying that information now... but I'm stubborn. Such is my life as a student. I relearn, restate and try to remember but I end up rediscovering the same lessons again and again...each time its a profound revelation.
One other important skill I've been struggling with this semester, is developing color and value relationships. So far, I am grasping the concept by thinking of it as a method of triangulating and palette organization. I try to mix several colors at a time and put them right next to each other until they relate the right way. My main concern will always be value. I'm really slow at it this process right now and my biggest failing is that I do not have the patience this process requires...yet. I beleive this is a matter of discipline and practice. I have to trick myself into that sort of stuff..

Next week! Final projects and an overview of my biggest successes this semester.