Home Stretch

The fall semester will be ending in just over a week. My final projects are due and I am working hard to get things done. I am really looking forward to the winter break. Hopefully, I will have a chance to focus on my painting.

My figure study was lit by soft, cool, natural light. It is a big change from eye straining fluorescent bulbs and bright spot lights. I am amazed at how the lighting alone changes the entire feel, value, and colors of a painting.

I truly enjoyed trying to capture the beautiful purples, pinks, blues and yellows that showed up in the model’s skin. Looking back on what I have learned, I wish that I had cropped my subject in a different way. However, I am pleased with the way some of my colors turned out.

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.

Another Simple Study

I do not have a lot of work to display for this weeks post. With only a few weeks remaining in the semester, I am going crazy trying to finish all of my final projects.

Here is the beginning of another figure study, representing only a few hours of progress. I started with a quick line drawing and followed up with my first pass of color. The illumination is generated from my school’s awful fluorescent lighting system. As apposed to a spot light, the lighting in this situation is not very dramatic and the value and color changes are very subtle.

I love studies like this one, because they are very challenging for me. I hope that they will enable me to better control the gentle value and color shifts of my paintings.

The Start

Throughout high school my teachers put a strong emphasis on producing a measured, proportional drawing. I feel like I spent so much time focusing on that one part that I never thought of the picture as a whole and basically spent my time attempting accuracy (which, sadly, rarely happened), and, like most young artists, rendering it to death. The following are samples of my mid to late high school work that also aided in my acceptance to PAFA. Most were done in graphite or colored pencil.

























































Lately I have noticed my work becoming more atmospheric and think that is where I would like to take it for a while. It's helping me break away from "rendering for the sake of rendering" and I feel like it's allowing me to create an entire space with room to move around the objects, rather than each object made individually with little relation to the others (as can be seen in the last one).

Portait Bust

This week I thought I would share some photos of the sculpture that I'm working on for a change. This is the portrait bust that I've been doing in my Head Structure class. Unfortunately, I don't have the uninstructed portion of the class, so I've only had a few sessions to work on it, and I only have one more class before I have to call it finished. But I've really enjoyed doing it and I feel like I've learned a ton from it. I'm taking another sculpture class next semester, so I'll get to try my hand at it again, which I'm really looking forward to.

Simple Study

Two weeks ago, I started this small figure study. I began with a quick under painting to block in the major lights and darks. I let the first layer of paint dry. Then I put down a rough pass of color. Next week, I will add more color and any final touches.

During this semester, I have had more time to experiment with paint. I am beginning to learn a lot about myself, my patience level, the styles of painting that I like and the techniques that I am interested in pursuing. The transition from sculpture over to drawing and painting has been a challenging but fascinating one. I have found that small, simple studies, like this one, teach incredibly valuable lessons.

Portrait Block-in

Well, unfortunately, I forgot to bring my camera into school this week, so instead I have a picture of the project that I worked on at home this weekend. This is a portrait of my sister that I'm doing as a final project for my portrait class with Al Gury. I'm working mainly from a photograph and then hopefully I'll be able to finish it up from life. Anyway, I did a quick underpainting last weekend, and then today I blocked in the whole thing roughly in color. Hopefully I'll be able to get another picture up after I make some more progress on it.