Categories

For the past two weeks during our Friday night Figure drawing sessions we've been opting to paint one long pose over the 4 hour time instead of the 20 minute poses we normally draw. It's good to paint, especially with oil paint, and to give yourself some time to really get involved with the process. Oil painting is surely a slower process and it's fun to work with mixing color and all the odds and ends that come with producing something in oil. It's a tough medium that needs to be worked with often to get a feel for. This is only our second week but the lessons learned so far have been immeasurable. Here's a few things I've learned so far:

> Keep your brush clean
> Apply the paint thin first then build up to thicker paint later
> There are infinite subtleties in color when mixing oil paint
> Sometimes you can get even more subtleties by mixing the paint on the canvas
> Wear gloves if your skin is sensitive to chemicals
> If you don't like the way it's coming out you can wipe the paint right off the canvas
> Mixing color in oils is liberating
> Paint with oils often, just keep on painting, then make more paintings..

Here's a shot of the gallery and some of our handy work. Paintings pictured by Mandy Gor, Kevin Corcoran, and myself.




Here's what I painted that night. It's not finished yet but getting close. waiting for it to dry before I go in and refine the many things that need work..
I was generally going for a more accurate color to what I actually saw. The subtleties in color between her skin tones and the clothing were so close. I
wanted to test myself to see if I could create color in a very closely related color palette..

My intention here was to create a digital painting from my mind and record the process with a screen capture program to show you the entire progression of the piece but the screen capture crashed right before I was done. So this one has no video to accompany it but I intend to do this now quite often so stay tuned to see some process paintings. For now all I have is the image of the final version of this. My goal for most of these will be to create mood and scale. I really love things that have massive scale and I think this one captures that thought process. Comments are always welcome and thanks for checking this image out.

There's something about this image that I really like. It's most likely the graphic quality of it. Structurally I think it has strength as well which I'm happy with. I believe the gesture of the pose and the shape the figure makes also feel good to me. It's images like this that keep me studying. There might have been a hand full of images before this that I didn't like but then when you least expect it you hit on something you've been thinking about and striving for. It's like being reborn into the excitement of learning and making new discoveries which is always a great place to be…

Here are some sketches of Bianca Dagga that I did one night at our Friday night figure drawing session..

Here's an image that I drew of a new model we worked with at the end of the year. This is Tania….

If you've been checking out my blog for some time you may have recognized that I draw Jazz often. She's a very powerful woman with energy to back up her physical strength. She's one of the hardest working dancer/model/actors in Ny. Here's yet another image I've drawn of her. See her official website here..

Just chiming in real quick to wish you a Happy New Year. Actually my niece made me do it, she said it was "the right thing to do". Can't argue with a 7 month old………I'll be looking forward to sharing whatever creative madness occurs this year with you. I'm expecting it to be a very creatively busy year. Hope your 2011 is nothing short of amazing…..

We recently had a drawing session at my gallery and the model for the night Gillian aka "Princess of the Forest", aka "Scrawny Burd" had an ambitious bone to pick about playing out a theme for the evening. I didn't need much coaxing to the idea since theatrical endeavors are right up my alley. Together we drummed up an Elvin princess theme. After picking out wardrobe I quickly got to work freehand airbrushing temporary henna tattoos to add to the Elvin look. The tattoos wrap all the way around and circle her breasts like a very light suit of armor complete with, of course, wings. The night held many creative treasures, a photo-shoot, some fun with iphone apps, drawings, and more.

Here's a listing of some of the creative beauty that came from this night so far. I like it when I get to stretch my creativity in many different directions and the following pictures are a little proof of that. I hope you enjoy these. Oh and a big thank you to Gillian, our willing model for literally embodying this character for the night. She acted the part so well that I'm pretty certain she wasn't acting at all……

Mixed media drawing by me….

Toonpaint iphone app manipulation by Kevin Corcoran

Photos of the princess taken by me

Here's a good look at the airbrushed wings

The princess fast asleep in a dream like image

"Scrawny burd" The Poster

Here's a pair of Converse that I did for a friend. His one stipulation was that they had the Social Distortion skeleton on them. Considering it was such a small area to draw an entire skeleton I decided to order a patch to put on the chucks. To give it a more Punk Rock look I burned the patches and then sewed them on by hand……
The converse themselves were created by starting with a grey pair, bleaching out white areas and drawing back into them with a black Sharpie plus some airbrush paint to add back a little grey…

Here's some images drawn of Anjela from her most recent visit to the US.