So I’ve been reading Richard Schmid’s book ALLA PRIMA Everything I Know About Painting recently. In it he suggests monochrome paintings as a way to get used to the brush. Doing a monochrome painting all you have to worry about are value and edges. You don’t have to consider color, which is for me the most time consuming part of painting. It’s like drawing with a third dimension.

I did these two the last couple of nights. I figure if I’m just sitting around my apartment I might as well be productive, even if it entails staying up a bit too late. The male one is a self-portrait. I don’t think that I really look like that. Kinda interesting how all my self portraits look different.

The reference for the female one was a painting by Sargent. I intended when I started to do a full color attempt to copy it. But it was too late and I started to like the energetic brushstrokes. So I stuck to the one color. It’s still a bit too cartoony for my liking. The eyes especially could use more attention, and the entire face is off centerline. So I need to pay more attention to drawing foremost and energetic brushstrokes second.

Here’s a couple that I did this week as Christmas presents for my family.  That’s a good thing about having some nominal ability to draw and paint.  If you’re broke, you can just make Christmas presents.  These are both subjects that I’ve never drawn or painted before.  A kid and a flower.  They’re not really subject matter that I’m drawn to.  As you can see from the rest of my art on this website, I prefer to paint things like empty alcohol containers and naked women.  Things that I can relate to.  OK, that’s not true, I’m awful at relating to women.

The flower is a gouache painting on Illustration board.  If you find stuff that’s thick enough it won’t curl.  The colors are way off in the picture, of course.  The light purple in the flower is much more subtle in real life.  The reference was a photo that my mother took on vacation in Florida.  I’m not sure what kind it is.  In the photo it was red, but when I got ready to paint I discovered that my tube of red was dried out.  So it became orange.

Kids are hard to draw.  In the picture I was looking at of the girls she’s about 1 year old.  She looks 5 or 6 in the drawing.  The more more defintion that you put in a drawing of a kid the older they look.  So I told her parents that I had drawn an age-progression of their daughter.  But, they seemed to like it.  I guess people like drawings of their kids.  If somebody gave me a charcoal drawing that they did of me from a photo, I might think it’s a bit odd.

So, just so everybody out there knows I haven’t been entirely unproductive over my vacation, I thought I’d post the images.

Here’s a couple of portraits that I did today in the drawing session. To try something different I took in gouache and did paintings. They came out pretty well. I think they’re my best painted portraits so far. I think the key is bristle brushes. I didn’t have them last time I was painting with gouache, so I couldn’t really scrub into the paint. If you look at the big versions of these, you’ll see how scumbly they are.

I think I’ll start taking paint to the session more often. What I need to do is devise an elegant way to get oil paint back and forth. It’s a huge hassle to transport. By the way, these are called 12-pack paintings because they are painted on the cardboard from a 12 pack of cheap beer. Tecate and Lonestar, respectively.

I also picked up a vacuum today for $25 off Craigslist. I’ve not had a vacuum in the place that I’ve been in for four or five months. I’m trying to get my apartment cleaned to the point where it won’t frighten women. Just in case. I feel a vacuum is an integral part of the plan.

I did this yesterday, just messing around in Photoshop with images from free CG texture sites. I wonder if they’ll ever need anything like this at work.

It’s been about a minute since I last made a post to the site. Last weekend I got back into the drawing sessions after missing a couple of week due to holiday traveling. I’ve been lazy about scanning these. We had the same guy two days in a row. I’m only posting the drawings that I think came out well. So here they are.

It might be time to update the look of this place a bit. That Flickr plug-in in the sidebar has never really worked. I’ve been using a great plug-in for Flash called Slideshow Pro at work and recently discovered that it will pull in images from a RSS feed. It’s a much more aesthetically appealing way to present the work. I might do that soon.