Figure Painting

At the Blue Sky figure drawing session for the last few weeks in October we did a sustained pose. A friend in the design dept, Vincent Nyguen, painted did a demo with me, and it was fun to see our different styles and approaches in everything from the lay-in/drawing to the paint application.  He's terrific, and it was fun to have him participate.  This painting represents a two week effort (total of 4 hours), and is 12"x 16".  I spent the entire first session just doing the underpainting/drawing, which I did with a brown madder color. The color was done the second session, and it was great painting over a solid lay-in.  This isn't the best photo of the painting, but hopefully it gives an idea.

Rye Plein Air paintout

I don't usually post photo reference of plein air pieces, but I thought this was a fun juxtaposition.  Along with some of the other fellows in the Design Dept. at Blue Sky, I participated in a fundraising plein air paint-out this past weekend for the Rye Arts Center, and it was a lot of fun.  We were able to paint at the American Yacht Club, which is where this piece was done, and I haven't done much marine painting before, so it was a great challenge.  The light was in and out, but I just couldn't pass up this awesome blue boat.  I would say that the photo ref is darker than the actual scene, and the photo of the painting is probably skewing a little light.  But it sold Saturday night at the auction, so it's only a guess. 

Recent Paintings

Here are some new lunchtime plein air paintings not previously posted.  A few are (obviously) from this past Winter, but I thought they merited a showing.  Similar subjects and compositions are starting to show up since with such a short window to paint (these are 1-2 hours during lunch), I can't wander very far.  And I don't particularly care for the piece at the bottom of the vines growing over the rock wall, but I just stuck it in there to show that you don't (can't) always hit a home run, but the failures are important too!  The second-to-last piece of the light streaking through the forest has a nice feel to it, I think I'll do a larger studio piece of it in the next month or two.  Enjoy!

A few new larger paintings

Here are two new paintings that I recently finished for a client in Massachusetts.  They are both 18x24, and represent scenes in the Richmond, MA area. Enjoy!

Recent Figure Drawings

Here are a few recent drawings from the weekly figure drawing sessions at Blue Sky.  Most are done with Conte Crayon on Canson Sketch paper and range from 2 minute to 40 minute poses. I'm really focusing on trying to consciously identify weaknesses in my approach and natural tendencies and work on them.  I find that in drawing, as in anything else, it is easy to simply go through the motions and perpetuate the same bad habits every week and not really improve. Proportion and solidity and two things I'm focusing on now. And that's the thing about drawing the figure, it will constantly humble you and you can never just 'dial it in' and expect a legitimate result. It demands respect and effort.