Two Recent and One Old

This painting is an old one that I thought I'd share.  It's oil on panel about 4ft X 2.5ft.  This was done as a class assignment back in college, and is a self portrait done from life.  From life?!  Yes, when I was younger and more fearless, I rigged up a mirror near the ceiling in my apartment, borrowed a suit from a friend, and just went for it.  I titled it "Corporate Fall", and I guess it shows how I imagined I would end up trying to lead the corporate life.  I kind of like the fact that we don't know if he was pushed off that building, or has jumped, but the expression says "regret".  Well, now it looks overly dramatic, and pretty amateur in technique to me, but at the time I was growing as an artist and young adult and I'm still fond of it.

The next two are drawings from recent life drawing sessions.

Figures!

From today's open life drawing session.

These last two are from a few weeks ago.  The first of which are one min poses which I love and hate doing - usually they are poor, but from time to time I manage to do some that I like.  Experienced artists know that the first few strokes are the most important.  Nothing is worse than spending the next twenty minutes trying to correct and redraw an image because you screwed up the proportions in the first few minutes and then based all of the rest of your decisions and measurements upon those first flawed lines.  The last drawing was a long pose (about 35-40 min, I think) that I drew on newsprint.  I wasn't happy with how flat it looked, so I added white chalk to get the highlights at the end.  The trouble with that is that the white chalk is only visible at the right viewing angle in the right light, and of course it didn't photograph well, so I tried to salvage it in Photoshop for your viewing pleasure.

Just for fun...

Sat Morn Life Drawing again

More Recent Figures

Some more recent drawings form the Saturday morn open life drawing sessions at UofO.  Trying to simplify and see the big shapes as I have a tendency to try and render every bump and wrinkle.

Charcoal on newsprint.

More studies from Leyendecker studies

Still learning from doing these, and enjoying it too.

Photoshop CS5.  I used mostly just two brushes to do these, but I put a little texture and a simple emboss effect on the highlights to give them more of the look of real oil paint.  Real oil on canvas has some body or thickness to it so it casts a little shadow on the canvas.

Me Wovely Life

   These are just a few of the images I've done over the years to immortalize my lovely wife.  When she was 8 months pregnant with our son, I asked her to model for a sculpture I wanted to do.  She was the cutest pregnant woman I have ever seen.  But, I think I made her stand too long, because I've had quite a hard time getting her to model for me ever since.

charcoal on paper, chavant oil-based clay (approx 2.5 in tall) , ballpoint pen, and graphite on vellum.