A Painting A Day

Since his daughters can't come to see him - I thought I would surprise him with this - so they will be there (sort of).

Lately I have this incredible desire to experiment. So today I tried oil pastels and did this quick sketch. Here are my initial thoughts. The oil pastels are a lot like crayons - very waxy. It's hard - almost impossible to get fine control (at least for me) so I couldn't get the detail I wanted. Blending is difficult. But they have a unique appearance and texture. I'm not sure that they are very well suited for portraits, but I think they would be great for landscapes.

I have to call this heavenly! It was the look on my 14 year old son's face watching the gogo dancers at Heavenly Ski Resort. The expression on his face is so hard to capture - it's knowing, inquisitive and amused all at the same time. This is just a sketch - with pastels - not meant to be a final piece. Just trying to capture that look.

I just started this one last weekend. I wanted to make this more abstract - but I feel like I'm putting too much detail in already. I'm going to try (very hard to do) to just finish the hands and the t-shirt and maybe do more to the background and call this one finished. But I am happy with how it's turning out so far.

I've been working on this for several weeks. First I didn't realize how difficult it was going to be to work on the faces because they were so small ( I was doing this on a 12 x 24 canvas ) and I had to use very small brushes. I just couldn't get the level of detail I needed to get. I was trying to make it fun, with lots of color but somehow it just didn't turn out like I wanted.

Here's the photo I was working from: