Size: 18″ x 36″

Medium: Acrylic on Canvas

Soundtrack: Pearl Jam

Medium: Water Colour & Gouache and Cold press Illustration board

Time: 2.5 hrs

Sound Track: My Morning Jacket

Beer: Sam Adams Boston Lager

My Typography sucks, but I like the Portrait.

Medium: Dry Erase Crayons on White Board

Time: 40mins

Sound Track: Small Change: Tom Waits

My first impressions were they are fun and fast to work with. I love the ease of blending and the speed of covering large areas with color. I don’t like the dust and I’m having difficulty building layers and my own inability to capture much detail with them.

All in all they are decent to work with, but I have a lot more to learn before being comfortable with them.

FYI I have no idea what’s going on in the background here.

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I started this painting in mid December. It took me till just now to finally finish it. It’s a portrait of my father, mostly drawn from a picture of us at my high school graduation party. I included some stage photos below so you can see how the process went. It went really really badly at times, but oils can be forgiving.

Time: 20 hours or so, over a 3 month period
Medium: Oil on tile 16″x20″
Sound Track: Gordon Lightfoot and The Sam Roberts Band mostly
Beer: Old Leghumper Robust Porter

Time: 2 1/2hrs
Medium: Oil Pastels on 96# Sketch pad
Sound Track: The Brian Jonestown Masacre
Beer: Blue Moon Winter Abbey

The first, and newest, is Red Rabbit, Acrylic on tile 11×14. I love 90% of this painting. i think the colors in her body came out just how I wanted them too, however I’m not as happy with the hair and face, but I still think they came out ok. I was able to get a lot of the depth and form I was looking for in the face especially.

The second, Roswell3, is an Oil Pastel on Canson paper (25×19). I am really happy with the way this one came out. I think it captures some of the quickness and loseness that the original sketches have, yet the colors and deeper contrasts make it a much more finished piece.

I’ve gone from hating this piece, to loving it, to hating, to thinking it was ok to thinking it was good… and on and on. Overall I’m not entirely happy with how it turned out, but learned a few things while painting it, the mot important being that even prepared clay board needs a coat of gesso on it.

Update: It seems maybe I came off a bit to harsh in the first post about this paining. While I’m not completely happy with it, and think I would like to have done some things better, I do overall like the way it turned out, I also like the things I learned while painting it.

I started out doing a rough sketch on a piece of tile that I had quickly and generously gessoed to cover over the previous sketch I had done on it and decided not to paint. This gave me a nice clean space to work in as well as adding some texture. I then blocked in shapes and colors and moved onto adding more layers of shadows and detail.

The whole process took about 9 hours over a weeks time. The palette I mentioned (which works by placing a wet sponge under parchment paper that you then place and mix your paints on) worked excellently. My Paints are still tube fresh and I plan to use them again this weekend for a new piece. I worked from a photo of a Facebook friend, whom shall remain anonymous, that I thought was very interesting. I would like to try to paint from life one day, but till then I plan to be working from random pictures of people I know.

I had to go back and correct the left hand (stage right) eye as I drew and painted it too high the first time around. I documented parts of the process with pictures as I went, they are below fallowed by the final piece. I think it came out well.