Maze

Here's a close up of a piece from a few months ago that I'm re-working. It's almost 3am but I have to say I'm happy with where it's going. I think this is one of the toughest things I've tried to tackle. 

Viva Las Vegas

So cleaning up some old work in preparation for an upcoming show, I came across this piece and forgot how much I liked it. I don't know why. I just do. I think it's done now. Better and brighter colors than before.

It's Been Awhile

Like the great Staind once said: "It's been awhile" (or was it Creed...no wait, it was Staind). While busy in my little 10'x10' dungeon, the harsh reality that art schools doors are coming to a close for me has set in. Time to bust my ass like no ass has ever been busted. (Insert jokes here). Here's a "quick" self portrait that took me the better part of the day. I'm actually happy with it though. I'm submitting it for my BFA senior show as an info pic for myself. It felt good to get back on track with microns again too. I was never really comfortable with them but maybe this will mark a turning point.

This was the first one. A day later I wasn't happy with it so I went back, got better reference, practiced some new marks, and started the redo. 

At this point I could already tell I would be much happier with it. I'm not as much of a master of microns as some of my other colleagues, but for a rookie, I was ok with the effort. I didn't take too many in-between shots but here's the final:

4"x6" micron/copic on paper. Cheers!

Selfies

I had one of those nights where you fall asleep a little early, like 11ish, which is fine but then you wake up at 2 in the morning and can't go back to sleep. I decided to pass some time by starting a small sketchbook dedicated to self-portraits. Why not?

It Figures

Here's a day by day progress collection of a recent painting I completed. It was a 5-day pose and was really my first time painting in this style and with this many thin layers.

Bill Cosby: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (finished)

 Here are the finished versions from the good, bad, and ugly from a few weeks ago. You can see how the designed progressed and simply changed from the preliminary sketches. All-in-all, I'm happy with how they came out.

The Good

The Bad

The Ugly

Hold Still...

Since early February, I've been doing 2 still life oil paintings a week for a class. They started out rough: bad drawings, bad compositions, bad understanding of color, but the last few weeks I've been happier with the work im putting out. Here's an example of one from this week I was quite pleased with.

Here's my set-up. I started out with a basic graphite drawing.

Here's a close-up of the same drawing.

It's worth noting that this painting was only done with Cadmium Red Light, Cadmium Yellow Light, and Cobalt blue, no white, no black, just those three colors. I started painting with thin, diluted paint and establishing basic washes and values. 

This is sort of in between in the painting process where I started to go more opaque with the paint. Knowing I couldn't use white, I had to leave some of the white canvas exposed, to act as my white, so I left those areas thin.

Fin.