Karina -- ASL Figure Painting: June 22 - 26

Same model as below. This picture took me a week. A lot of that week was spent staring blankly. When I got tired of that, I liked to mix up the wrong paint colors, scrape them off my palette, and start over mixing more of the wrong colors.

I probably should have started a new painting at day 2. I'm going to try to be more disciplined about doing new paintings every day instead of continuing to fiddle with the old.

There aren't many beginners in our class. Mary Beth told me and the few others that the best thing we could do for ourselves would be to work on "starts" rather than finishing paintings. It's hard to make yourself quit and start something new.

oil, 16x20 cotton duck canvas

yuck -- ASL Figure Painting: June 15 - 26 [Karina, Karina, Maria, Maria]

The model poses change every 2 wks, so in this, our 3rd wk of the session, we're into our second set of models/poses.

In the first week, we did a series of 4 one-day studies.
We're supposed to direct special attention to getting the colors right.

1. Abstraction to simpler geometric shapes.
2. Application of paint with palette knife only, no brushes. (Isn't it interesting how much shinier this makes the paint?)
3. Memory painting of model seated directly behind us, or out of line-of-sight.
4. Non-dominant hand--for me, left hand only to mix and apply paint. It drove me crazy.

I really, really didn't want to post these but, by this point, it seems unscientific not to! So, for the sake of science...







oil on 9x12 canvas pad.

Tyrone--ASL Figure Painting: June 1 - 12

I've started attending a figure painting studio session at the Art Students League. My instructor, Mary Beth McKenzie, talks to us individually for a few minutes 2x per week. She is generous and insanely good at both painting and teaching, but the class format leaves me unsupervised longer than I'm used to and I've been screwing up my paintings a lot more now! These screw-ups are all good, necessary steps toward maturity, I think.

That's the pep talk I use to I cheer myself up and steel myself up for more of this!



Mary Beth persuaded me to give up on this one and start anew. Good advice.

So, same model, same pose:



I spent most of these 2 weeks mixing colors I never used. I learned how to make a lot of colors. GRAAAA!!!

This model's skin tone is made with viridian green + cadmium red, which yields a startlingly rich brown or purple, depending. I also learned to push around a rich color that starts with black + cadmium red + cadmium yellow. I think whatever that's called is going to be one of my new favorite colors.

oil on cotton duck canvas, both 16x20