Adding glazes and modifying Lorena 20"x24"

The portrait of Lorena finally got dry enough for me to try applying some glazes. I used M Graham's non-toxic walnut alkyd medium for oils, mixed with small amounts of paint.







Note: The top photo is of the eyes after I read pasadenaadjacent's comment and re-painted; the lower is of the askew eyes pasadenaadjacent commented upon. The last photo is of the whole portrait, as it now looks.

Woman

I think I said something like, I'm done for now, on the last post. But I wasn't. I think this is it, at least for a while.

Painting continues

This is the painting after a bit more work. I think I'm going to stop painting on it now and maybe try applying some glazes on areas to get some added depth and mystery (M Graham makes a non-toxic glazing medium for oils that I am eager to try out).

Painting begins

I'm working on a large oil painting of a cafe scene. As a diversion, I decided to paint from one of the drawings posted below. This is what I have, so far. I'm painting on a 16"x20" canvas; over another painting.

Note: This is not the large cafe scene I'm working on; this is the diversion from that work. (Clarification prompted after Cafe Pasadena's comment, in post above, and my re-reading of what I wrote.)

Some Charcoal Figure Drawings

These charcoal drawings, except for the portrait in the upper left, were done on18"x24" white paper. All were drawn from life. The portrait was drawn in NYC; the remainder in Mary Yanish's drawing class at ACAN, in 2007.

For all of these, I took charcoal dust, which I made by rubbing a piece of charcoal on a sandpaper block, and smeared it into blank paper. Then I drew with a stick or pencil of charcoal (or both). Then I used an eraser to draw light areas on the first two drawings, as well as the last.

P.S. I'm going to listen to myself (see comments) and drag myself and my paper and board out of the house and out to some uninstructed workshop with a live model as soon as possible. Though it's messy and often frustrating, this kind of drawing is just too much fun to give up.

Exercises with the Zorn Palette

These are oil paintings on canvas, each 12"x16" and each done with the Zorn palette (except on the right, it looks like I may have picked up a little ultramarine blue at the end and put it on the hair and maybe some bits of cadmium yellow, also at the end), painted around 2006. The painting on the left is a self-portrait, done while staring in a mirror (and, no, I don't literally look like that, though I certainly painted what I felt at the time); the painting on the right is my version of a color copy of a work by an artist unknown to me. (This was an exercise from my then teacher, John Paul Thornton.)

The Zorn palette, named after a turn of the century (19th to 20th) Swedish painter, consists of white, ivory black, a yellow and a red (so I was told). I think I used yellow ocher and cadmium red, as my yellow and red on the copy of the unknown painting; I think I used alizarin crimson as my red on the self-portrait.

What you will quickly discover with this palette is that colors are relative. Your black and white mixes will look blue-ish, and your yellow and black mixes will look green-ish. If you take your black and white mix and mix it with your red, you will get something purple-ish, and so on. You can get a lot of beautiful colors from mixing these four colors in varying proportions.

In trying to re-construct when these were painted, I googled this wonderful artist, John Paul Thornton, whom I was lucky enough to learn from when he taught at the now closed Fine Artists Factory in Pasadena. His blog is aptly called Art and Courage; apparently he will have a book, available in June, also called Art and Courage. If you are interested in learning from a great teacher, I recommend checking it out. If it is anything like his in-person lessons, it will be well worth looking for.

Vancouver Farmers Market Paintings

These are the two paintings I've done so far that are about a recent spring
morning farmers market in the Pacific Northwest town of Vancouver, Washington.

If you've seen the earlier posts about Flower Seller, you know that painting an oil painting on such a large scale was a new experience for me. It was so big, I had to move it off the easel and prop it against a wall in order to finish painting it.