Portrait Painting

I took a portrait painting class as a follow up to my Intro to Oils class. This class was acrylic or oil optional. The first session I tried acrylic, but I quickly realized that with a live model, acrylics just dry too quickly to be useful. So for the rest of the classes I used oils.

I'm not really sure how I feel about this class or the results. I went into the class feeling like it would be an easy transition from the last class, considering I draw faces for a living. I quickly found out that painting portraits would me much more challenging than I thought. When drawing I can usually get a likeness when I want to. But for some reason, in every class, I couldn't get one piece to look like the model. Unlike the previous painting class, I left every class quite frustrated.

Here are some samples, but there's not much I can say about them. I must be perfectly honest: None of these are 100 percent my work. The instructor would go around the class (which by the end was all of 2 people), and pick up a brush and fix problems with our paintings. Not to say this method didn't teach me anything, but I think I would have preferred more verbal instruction to go along with it. But if i had to put a number on it I would say these are about 85% my work. But the 25% that looks good on all these is the instructor, who is a very talented painter.

I have, however, enjoyed the process. I am beginning to get the hang of paint. This is definitely something I want to do more of on my own, and definitely something I want to improve upon. So I'm sure you will see more paintings in the future.

O Brother

Here are some sketches I did a month or so ago. They are from one of my favorite movies, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" I love the color schemes of that whole movie. I've been thinking (once I get my painting skills up) of doing a good finished piece based on the characters. Enjoy these till then.

Oil Sketches

I realized that, for whatever reason, in my artistic pursuits I have steered myself away from painting. When I discovered Photoshop, I was very happy because it seemed like the "safer" way to paint. The time has come where I can no longer avoid the issue, so I decided to take some painting classes to get me started. Theres a great little not-for-profit art school locally called Crealde where I signed myself up for an Intro to Oil Paint class. Unfortunately each class only has like 5 or 6 sessions, but thats enough to get the ball rolling.

Here are the results of my oil painting class. I call these sketches because they aren't even close to being done. This first one was about an hour's worth of work. I think its obvious I have a lot to learn here.

Each session became less demonstration and more time to paint. This one took about 2 hours.

This last one took almost 4 hours. Painting onions is deceptively hard.

For years I would hear how great it is to paint in oils, but I must admit I don't feel like its a medium I would pursue much further.

On one hand, I like the mixing of colors because theres just something about colors in oil. There's a certain...naturalness or life to the colors that you just can't capture with a camera. Well maybe thats not true for these, but if you ever see really good paintings in person, they just have something that you can't reprint in a book. Plus they dry really slowly so mixing large amounts of color isn't much of a problem.

On the other hand, they just dry sooo slowly! I can't stand the drying times. If you are working on something and you want to let it dry before you go on, you have to wait about a week! Plus there is a lot more of a process (and more chemicals) that goes along with oils. Its just a little too high maintenance for me. Which says something about me: I'm impatient and lazy.

Even though I didn't enjoy the oils as much as I thought, I'm still willing to give it more time. Maybe I'll have an epiphany or something. In the meantime I have signed up for a portrait painting class and this one is mostly acrylic, so I'll see how that works out.

My first published work...almost

Here's a lil something strange I drew up for New York Post. It was a spot illo that was meant to go with an article about Yoko Ono's newest album. If I had to tell the truth, I would say I'm not super happy about the final result. I should and could have done something more dynamic with what I was given. That might be why it never made it to print.

Buffy

This is a weak attempt at that Buffy chick. Done at work on a slow day from a photo.

Digital Condi

A 20 minute digital study I did of a photo I took at Sea World. Mostly done for practice in picking colors in Photoshop without the use of the eyedropper tool.

Here are some sketches I did from some magazines while at Borders.

I drew this one of Hillary Swank when I was bored at work yesterday.

First blog

This blog thing is a first for me, so I'm just testing things out. Here's a caricature I did of Phyllis Diller. I'm not too sure about the likeness but it was fun.