Restarted Life drawing classes for the new year. This is the first painting. same as always. Oils on canvas over two hours. This week I tried using the pallet knife to make the light areas as bold as possible, using the brush to blend the edges.
Tag Archives: Life
Oil Paint Practice
Fantastic lesson yesterday. Still sticking with the box layout technique Jon showed me last week. The image really came together in the first hour. This is really great as I seem to be getting quicker at blocking out and getting to the point I would normally get to after 2. This is giving me more time to work on tone and colour. The end likeness isn’t to bad. I spent most of the second hour working on the face. Hopefully this speed up in the layout will continue and ill be able to get deeper into the tone and colour in future paintings.
Oil Paint Practice
From last weeks Life drawing lesson. 2 hours with oils on canvas from a life model. Jon started the session by showing me how to lay out the posture using boxes rather can spheres. Up to now I have had allot of trouble getting the initial posture/composition right in these sessions using the sphere technique. Jon wanted me to try boxes now. And it worked. This is the first session that i can remember where Jon has not had to come in and make changes to scale/composition. Jon said that he does not teach box layout earl as with painting it is important to learn to paint curves initially as in particular with portraiture the body is mostly curves not hard angles. Once painting curves has been practiced the painter can move over to boxes for layout making scale easier to manage and also allowing curves to be added in (over the boxes) once the painting begins. very happy with this one. No Lesson next week but maybe ill try to practice this technique at home.
Oil Paint Practice
Back from a 7 day holiday in Berlin and I am feeling refreshed. With that fresh return I had a great Life Drawing lesson this week. It actually started off badly as i began with a small brush and focused to heavily on sketching out the image. Jon called me out on in pretty quickly though and once I moved to a larger brush and actually started painting and not sketching it really came together. I am very happy with the likeness and the use of light and dark contrast. Not so happy with the actual brush work. Allot of it feels quite unrefined and but hay its practice so i cant expect to get everything right.
Oil Paint Practice
Catching up with the now. This is the painting from the life drawing lesson last Thursday. Using the flip side of the cardboard from the week before (still no canvas). I tore of the finish layer creating a very fluffy layer underneath. Bad idea. It became even more absorbent than with the finish. Never mind. Pay day on Friday so I can get some new canvases. Still using Oils with a Life model over 2 hours. A focus on colour mixing. The image itself is maybe not so great but I am pleased with the colour choices. The dark green/brawns add a real depth that I haven’t always achieved with my other paintings. The face is terrible again, not a good likeness. You may note the eyes on the far right of the board and my utter failure to recreate the effect in the actual image. Next week I may go bigger with the face so that i can focus on these details. I have a habit of trying to fit the hands and the head into the one image. I need to stop doing this and focus on more specific areas and make them bigger on the canvas. Or ask the model to put the hands nearer the head 😉
Oil Paint Practice
Ok catching up with the now this is from a week ago. Life mode with oil paint. Not on canvas this time as Ive run out! I have been re-using a few of them but they are getting pretty thick with paint now which doesn’t make for a great texture to paint on. Back to this image. Instead of using canvas I used piece of colored card. If canvases with paint already on them are a bad texture to paint on the the card is terrible. The paint just absorbs in and goes nowhere. There was a silver lining to this though as it forced me to get allot thicker with the paint. Its not the best image but again lots of focus on colour mixing and getting correct tones.
Oil Paint Practice
Painting from life on canvas with oils. This is from 3 weeks ago.Ive been a little lax in posting the images as its been so hectic with other projects. I’m making a new move towards learning how to mix the colours needed. You may notice the strong salmon colour here which is made using orange, yellow and white. I still have a way to go but will be focusing on this over the next few lessons. Overall i was pretty happy with this one. Especially around the body area. Still struggling with faces.The likeness is better than usual. I feel like its still not really very painterly or expressive. I guess that will come. I still need to look at doing some studies.
Im going to the John Singer Sargent exhibit at the nation al portrait gallery to have a look at some works fro ma master. Maybe that will help.
Oil Paint Practice
Disaster!.. Ok not disaster but just a bad session. I toyed with not posting this as I am not happy with it at all and didn’t even enjoy the process of doing it. This is meant to be a history of my paintings though so it doesn’t make scene to leave it out. Its not the first and I am sure it will not be the last session to frustrate me. Oils on canvas from Life. I struggled from the outset. Trying to use more medium earlier on as I did before but no matter what I did I just couldn’t seem to render the image as I was seeing it. For some reason I just didn’t have the same success mixing the colours and tones as I have done previously. Maybe time to try another monochromatic painting again.
Oil Paint Practice
A great life drawing lesson from two weeks ago. Life model on canvas with oils. Although as always there is allot I didn’t get right I was very pleased with this effort. In particular the colours and tones which just came together without much effort.
I was also using medium to thicken the paint from an early stage so, although the image doesn’t really show it. The final painting has some really nice texture variations.
Oil Paint Practice
The first Painting after the first life drawing class of the year. A familiar model on canvas with Oils. Im pretty happy with how it came out. After a 4 week break from painting. A slow start it all came together nicely at the end of the two hours.
heartfactory.co.uk 
