We painted last night at Jeremy's for the 1st night in a while. I did a self portrait while Jeremy did 2 paintings of me painting. Here is the sketch and the nights fruition.

Yaaaay, I think its all finished. I lightened up the background and added a few more details to the faces and eyes. Now the piece feels well balanced and every ones faces seem sincere and believable.

Its really coming along, everything is laid in and now I just have to make some finishing tweaks. I'm not sold on the background and have to decide on where to take it, but the forms are all there and I'm happy with the likenesses.

I started a new commissioned piece for my buddy Phil. It's a Christmas present so I have to knock it out on a pretty tight deadline but so far I'm making good progress. I started with a base drawing to layout all the forms but didn't get too crazy with the details or shading, I'll save that for the actual painting.



After the drawing I did a brown rub on top to unify everything all the paint that will follow. The portrait is of 3 people who have passed away so I thought the brown sepia tone would help give the piece a aged quality . The next day once the wash was dry I did my 1st pass with paint. I tried to get a good base on all the skin tones, and blocked in the eyes and the clothing.

delivered

I finally turned it over and said goodbye. Dalia was even a little teary eyed. Awe

We'll I hate to say it but it took me a long time to get back to this. I was afraid to touch it, because it was looking pretty good and I thoughgt I might fuck it up. Every time I tried to adjust somethign it felt like it was getting worse and worse. Last week we got together at Jeremy's for our FNPC and was determined to finish it...




I added some more detail to Dalias hair and flowers, I also too some of the dark blue out of the dress. It was tempting to try and change the background color because the green is so bold and overpowering but it grew on me and although its abrasive when you 1st look at it I think it will work for something you look at everyday. It won't get boring and it really helps the people pop. I could keep working on this thing forever. Paintings rarely feel finished when you are working on them because you can always do more... but more isn't always better. It feels solid so I'm happily moving on to the next piece.

We had our usual Friday Night Painting Club at Jeremy's house last night and the painting is really looking about finished now. The background color was way to distracting and even with the tone of the skin, so I darkened it to pop the lighter toned warm colors in their faces. Now their the focus again. I also did another pass on Dallia and smoothed out the skin tones. I also added some more paint to the dress and flowers but am keeping things towards the bottom pretty abstract still. Jeremy was nice enough to point out that Darrens back hand only had 3 fingers so I added a pinki!

round 3 or so

This is the 1st posting on a portrait I'm working on for some recently married friends, Darren and Dalia Mitchel.
I had taken a bunch of pictures of this painting, documenting all the steps but unfortunately my computer deleted all the pictures. So here it is about half way, everything is established and I already took a second pass at Darren's head. For this one I started with a really detailed drawing because its an old friend and I wanted to make sure I got the likeness down. After a few nights of painting everything is laid in and I've just added a background color. I really like to leave parts of the painting raw and unfinished like the jacket and flowers, keeping your attention to the heads and expressions. Even their hair is pretty simple, the white highlights on his is the white canvas below.

I have a blog now!

yaaay, I finally set up a blog. Now I have one more project to neglect and incorporate into my long list of tasks and hobbies. Hopefully when it gets going it will give you an insight into my painting technique and give me a place to vent my frustrations while working on my fine art. Enjoy and thanks for reading!