Spare me forty winks.

Working with oils, here are my first two attempts at oil painting. Working with oils was a lot more satisfying than water colors if only for the chance to correct mistakes.

Cleaning up takes forever though and I have to save thirty minutes just to wash out my brushes. I'll have to make an artist's pallet that'll be easier to clean instead of the water color bins I've been using.

These were painted as apartment warming gifts for some friends, I just have to find some frames and some time to drive it out to them.

Its about time I have another "big" painting project, I should have one up in two weeks or so.

I guess I'm trying to say thank you? - Part 1

This will be the first painting in a set of twelve.

Here's a teaser.
(No post-processing this time, sorry.)

the Devil

Just a quick test of shadow play. I intended this to be a tonal sketch for a watercolor but kept going with it. I'll have to redo this in water sometime after my interviews.

I did this with HB lead on 90 lb watercolor paper. I then coarsely chopped off the area around the figure using a photo editor.

Size matters

Most of us have drawn people-like figures only to have created a horribly disfigured person. Sometimes this is intentional most often, not. For those of us who don't have the artistic flair to produce exaggerated figures that can pass for art, basic proportions of the human figure are a good place to start.

I wanted to stray away from cartoon style drawings and so picked up a few pointers from Loomis' book.

A male can be drawn 8 head-heights tall. Partitioning the figure head-height-wise, other features of the human body can be placed. It'd be faster if you just look at a picture. Having drawn a few of these, I was able to alter them a little bit to fit in with whatever artistic style or action I want without the reference lines.

Proportions are great, but we also need to correctly present the weight distribution of our figures. I simply copied some mannequins from Loomis' book. I'll be playing with these mannequins until I am comfortable with weight distributions.

Pierot'd be sad too.

A lesson learned the hard way. Water coloring technique is a LOT different when compared to graphite, pastel, or other paintings. The fact of the matter is, water coloring is not supposed to be precise. You simply direct the flow of water and let the paint playfully settle where it wants to.

I started out this painting by laying down broad washes then waiting before laying down another layer to darken areas. It is very important that the previous layer be completely dry if you want to avoid back run and inadvertent color mixing.

In painting this piece, I've discovered that I have no idea how to control the tinting strengths of paint. So the next few pieces I'll be doing will hopefully teach me a bit more about how to control tone.

Three spaces.

The first painting I'll be working on is based on this.

It's a fairly simple model, monotone, and simple shapes.
This should give me some good practice on tonal shading.

Ignoring what I know about anatomy and sketching what I saw, the eyes are a tad bit farther apart than I'd like them to be. Good thing it doesn't matter. (Hamm suggests in his book that you should fit a third eye in the space between the two.)

Sometimes being just a little off gives off a very uneasy feeling that can either add or detract from a painting or drawing. The pencil sketch doesn't mean anything though, there's still time for corrections when I actually paint the thing.

For this sketch, I used a 0.5 mechanical pencil loaded with HB lead on student grade 90lb cold press.

Starting Over

Since my 365 project lost momentum back in August I haven't been painting very much.

It turns out 6 months of not painting has allowed me to forget most of the bad habits I learned just slopping around paint. It turns out this might not have been a bad thing after all.

Things in my life have been changing and this is a good opportunity to start over anew. I am learning how to walk again.

Here is my promise to you: I will post all of my work no matter how awful, embarrassing, or uninteresting they are.

I am bad.

I am bad and so are my paintings.

I have the art and dexterity of an undernourished Norwegian child.
I have awful ideas and even worse implementations.

You can follow my journey here.