R. O. Y. G. B. I. V.

In case there's some confusion, "ROYGBIV" stands for red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. I'm starting to really like drawing old, worn out antiques.

As always, feel free to comment.

Strawberries

And now for something completely different.... ;-)


I went about painting this still life about the same as usual, but this time I took pictures of my process. I like it when other artists show their process work, so I wanted to see how it would work with mine. My paintings almost always start off sort of abstract because I'm trying to lay out dark areas, light areas, and figure out other composition issues.








Next I start with the block-in drawing, which is basically a line drawing with colors and values added between the lines. I usually work on everything at the same time, so that everything has the same amount of completion and I don't end up focusing too much on one part of the painting and lose the overall composition. But since I was working with strawberries (the leaves wilt quickly), I finished the strawberries one by one.







In the first pic I laid out my main dark and light areas, and while I worked on the strawberries individually, I worked on the rest of the painting in stages. First I refined the dark background, added the block-ins, and then worked on values. At this point I blocked in the fruit and added some color. This also allowed me to mark the position of the fruit.







At this stage I'm still blocking in strawberries. I've refined most of the background and I'm almost finished with the bowl.











Here's the finished painting. One of the fun things about working with this still life is rendering the different surfaces, like the rust on the can and the skin on the strawberries. Feel free to comment or criticize.

Another Figure Drawing Session

It's been a looooong time since I posted something. After working on oil painting and figure sessions I realized that I haven't worked on a still life in months. I finally got started on one this last week. In the meantime here's something from one of the sessions I've been to. Over a span of about three months I've done a lot of these drawings, including a lot of bad ones. This is one of the better ones. Feel free to comment of criticize.

Another Figure Drawing Session

I'm trying to refine my process a little bit, meaning that I'm focusing more on the drawing than the values, shading, etc. Feel free to tell me what you think.

Onions and Peppers

I thought I'd go away from the vertical compositions I usually work with and work with a horizontal arrangement. The view is from a lower perspective and everything is arranged side by side.

I like drawing red onions. They have a small, rounded shape and they're easy to draw. It's a lot more challenging to render and paint them because of the subtle value and color changes along the shape. And it's tempting to draw the lines in the onion skin too dark.

I'll be doing more oil painting from now on, mostly to get more familiar with it. I've been checking out a few daily painting sites and I'm really inspired to give a try. I just hope I have the discipline to stick with it.

Feel free to comment.

Still Life with Chinese Tile

I had a really hard time setting this one up. I wanted to direct light from the top left of the composition to the bottom right and really emphasize the vertical orientation. Since a lot of the composition is in the dark, I wanted to soften the edges in the dark parts and sharpen them in the lighted areas. Finally I wanted to emphasize the highlights on the fruit to show the path of the light.

Despite the fact that it took so long to set up and paint, it was fun painting this one. The Chinese text was really challenging to draw and render because the light caused a subtle change in value, so it wasn't entirely black in some areas.

Please feel free to comment.

Figure Drawing Session

I've taken a little break from life drawing sessions, mostly because of other things. Here's one that was finished almost a month ago. It comes from a long pose (3 hours).

Feel free to comment...