After The Show

After The Show

12" x 12"

Mixed media on panel

The source image for this painting was one of those vintage "How To" books. I took the image and made it my own - not following the steps outlined in the "How To" to come up with the final image.

I am becoming more and more interested in experimenting with paint. I use to mix paint on a pallette and then obsessively paint surfaces to render something as photo realistic as possible. I was never satisfied with the end result and it felt like torture! I guess it seemed the only way it could be a "real" painting was if it was done in a photo realist fashion. After a few years and some good teachers in art school, my style has loosened up dramatically and everything's the better for it.

I won't have a lot of new paintings to post for awhile due to the move to the art community. I've been focusing on nude figure studies lately and I can't wait to do some more! I might skip some packing this weekend and make time for painting. I need to get into "the zone".

Sketchbook Excerpts, Cont.

In about an hour I will be off to Texas. I'll be in the land where everything's bigger for a week so I won't have anything to update on until after then. As you can see above I'm taking a few of my favorite drawing implements. My favorite materials for sketchbooks are soft graphite pencils (in the 6B and softer category), white acrylic paint (to cover botch jobs and add visual interest all at the same time!), various erasers, miscellaneous charcoals, and a perennial favorite, rolling ball pens!

Sketchbooks are really a place for ideas to be stored. My problem when it comes to art is having too many ideas. I'm trying to make better habit of drawing ideas and keeping them in "storage" rather than trying to execute a series on a whim. One of my good friends told me to slow down and pull back, likely sage advice!

These were some color studies for flesh tones I did for a class I was taking, basically all skin tones are derived from white, siennas, yellow ochre, ivory black, and a little bit of red (buying prefab skin tone is, in fact, cheating). The color mixing possibilities are endless. It was also a fun way to put pictures from my "male models" collage folder into my sketchbook!

I read Scene and Herd at Art Forum every month when I get the reminder from my subscription to do so. I like to people watch on the photos and imagine I'm part of the smoke and mirrors "glamorous life". So one day, without anything to draw, I started inserting myself in the photos! It cracks me up but others might find it a little odd (what's new?)..

You can see a shift in the way my sketchbooks are going. I'm getting a lot looser with the materials and as the caption readings, performing "experiments". I used to be wrapped up in thinking I was competing for The Most Perfect Drawings Ever but that has ceased to interest me.