Hipbone Wednesday

As previously mentioned, my drawing is not so accurate when I work in oils, so at today's drawing practice, I thought I'd work in pastel to see if that might help bridge the divide between line (drawing) and color (paint). The "jury is still out" on that. Anyway, here are a couple of today's efforts.

Catherine (reprise)

Update 2/25/13 - This image shows progress made, so I removed the two earlier stages. I'll leave this for a while now, and probably see more to fix after more time passes.

I'm trying to figure out why--in general--I can draw decently, but that doesn't translate to paint. I think I did better here, but I could see that her left upper arm was too short, and forearm was too long.Well, at least I can see these things, and thereby fix them. I guess that's progress.... in days past, I just couldn't figure out what the heck was wrong. I like that I brought a pink-toned panel to work on, that was synchronistically fortuitous, given that we had porcelain-skinned Catherine to work with again in our Friday session.

Una cerveza, por favor!

Today I did the block-in for a medium-sized oil painting, referencing several photos taken at a cafe in Madrid in.... 2011?!  Gosh, I can't even say that trip was "last year" any more. Guess it's time to put my walkin' shoes on again, book a flight to.... um, well, there's my problem.  So many places to go, which order do I take them in? That's all speculation right now, so I'll stick with painting memories for the time being.

Model Marathon at Hipbone

Thanks to Jeff at Hipbone (link over there on the right), we had 9 models in 9 hours, with a 10-min. break between each to pee, eat, change out materials, etc. And a bunch of great models they were! I think these are more or less in the order in which I did them, over the course of the day. From the 1-min. pose at the top, it was a challenging day. I ended up with close to 30 drawings, so I'll spare you the whole kit-n-kaboodle. There is one that I did in acrylic--which was way too ambitious with such limited time--and once I tweak it I'll add it here.

All work done on 2/10/13

Ang looks a little pallid here

This is from another Friday afternoon session at Kat's studio.  Ang has a kind of pasty, morbid look, which is unintended (of course!) The blue-toned mdf board worked well for the last few paintings, but not this one.  I think that it's a matter of not enough paint layered on, and I will see what I can do with her at some future date... maybe even tomorrow! (uh-huh)  This photo is compliments of Celeste, from her labor-of-love blog called "Alla Prima"... link is over there on the right.  I forgot to photograph this myself, so here is Ang#2, again for the sake of chronology.
Painting begun 2/8/13

The Vatican Guard

I can't tell you how many times I've heard that you shouldn't paint from photographs.  Well, whatever.  This one is painted from a photo from my travels, I think this trip was in 1985. The thing that made me go for my camera was when he saw I was going to take a picture, he started to adjust his outfit, and the vanity of the gesture kind of surprised me.  So that is what I'm trying to depict here--a gesture. This is a work in progress, and I'm posting it now in a futile attempt to keep this blog in chronological order.  And I'm behind (again) in posting.
Painting started approx. 2/5/13

Cloud was his name....

We had another terrific model at Kat's Friday.  BTW, the last three paintings have been in oil. This one and the Catherine portrait head are on MDF with toned gesso base.