A Painting A Day

Okay soooo am trying a little sculpture. I am using an old photo of my son in his football jersey. Its extremely hard to get a likeness of him in clay. I really need other photos from the side at least - and my son is so much older now that I don't know if he can model for me. But it's fun to experiment with other media.

  We had a new model at live painting class tonight. She has very beautiful features and lovely skin tones. I don't think I have the right side of her face dark enough. I think I'm still a little scared of going all out and actually painting what I see. Hopefully I will gain the courage to do it next time!

  I've never done a baby painting before, but this one reminded me so much of one of my baby sisters (when they were babies of course - now they're old women!) that I just had to give it a shot. This is just a small study - a 6" x 8". I did a lot of things different on this. I put some different colors in my palette like a pre mixed violet, permanent rose, and raw umber. The other thing I did was actually mix the colors before I started painting. That saved a ton of time - whipped this out in just under an hour, and I thought it made the skin tones turn out better because I wasn't mixing them on the fly.

I was on a painting frenzy yesterday! Two paintings in one day! Love it! So first let me preface this by saying, this is not a moviestar! Haha! When I was painting it I was trying to reveal the emotion in her eyes.

I had such good response from the last Keanu, that I decided to paint him again. I painted this from a photo I found on creative commons that had a right to modify license.
I painted this on a really big canvas (for me) - it's a 24" x 36" canvas. So to keep things semi in scale I started off by making a grid with charcoal on the canvas and then drew the outline of him on the grid with charcoal. Then I fixed that, and painted over it.
I think the grid helped me tremendously to keep things in scale - which is hard when you go larger. The only problem is my paint is not really covering the old grid lines! I've tried putting the paint on thick, but since I am painting a lighter color than the dark charcoal grid, it's still showing through. Oh well, I guess lesson learned - next time I will do the outline and erase the grid before starting to paint!
Also the angle of his face was difficult for me. He is cocking his eyebrow, with his face twisted and angled - a real challenge! I may go back and do a little more detail. I have not spent very much time on this so it could use more polishing. I am thinking I might enter this in a juried competition, but am running out of time!

Started on this last night, and didn't have enough time to finish - so I worked on it a little more tonight and finished. Posted it on instagram and was really happy because @keanureevesoficial reposted it to their 10,000 followers! Yay! Got some major exposure!

I have never painted a horse before, so this subject was a bit outside my comfort range. I usually paint faces and figures, so it's good to do something else. I guess I could argue that every subject is foreign because you have never painted that particular face or place before anyway.

I found the reference photo for this on flickr with a creative commons license. I loved the yellow light that backlit the horses.

This is quite a large piece - it's a 16x20 on canvas. I had toned the canvas a pinkish color and purposely let a little of it show through in the clouds and the distant mountains.

I soooo wish I had time to paint every day. It's like falling in love - I fall in love with every subject and then in my own way - bring my idea of them to life.

I have been so busy I haven't had time to paint - so very late tonight I started on this. It's funny, when I started I was quite certain it wouldn't turn out well at all. It looked really bad! Ha! But I went back to Sue's methods - block in the darks - block in the lights and before long it started to look like her. It's Joan Crawford by the way - in case you can't tell. I love my moviestars ~