Em and Osa oil

12″ x 9″ oil on canvas

 

A quick oil sketch. I was able paint loosely on this one and didn’t get hung up on a likeness. Doing the gouache sketches helped with this, I think.

About.com Travel Sketching

My blog was recently mentioned in an article on About.com:Drawing/Sketching. Specifically my Costa Rica Travel sketches were featured.

I’d like to thank Helen South for mentioning me and all the About.com visitors who have stopped by to view my work. I hope you saw something you liked and, if you sketch and blog, please leave me a note so I can visit yours.

Portraits

I haven’t posted anything in a while but I have been working. I’ve been painting portraits but haven’t produced anything I like yet. I wanted to do a series of portraits of friends and family and, naturally started with family since they were handy.

I wonder if anyone uses live models for portraits these days. Having someone else in the studio while I paint is very distracting for me and I always worry about the model and feel like I need to entertain them and make sure they’re comfortable.

It seems like maybe starting with people I’m attached to, especially my wife and daughters, was not such a good idea because I’m too invested in a likeness and a painting that they won’t hate.

This is a sketchbook page of some studies.

5″ x 8″ watercolor, ink and gouache

Osa on Mandala

Scared dog – gouache

5″ x 8″ goauche and ink

Our dog has fear issues, can you tell? She was rescued from a bad situation and is very fearful in unfamiliar situations – like my studio.

Self Portraits

16″ X 16.5″ oil on paper final state

I’ve done a lot of self portraits over the years and it’s always an interesting process. In my opinion, it’s impossible to be subjective about your own visage. After staring into your own eyes for hours, you become blind to it in some ways and it’s even more difficult to know whether you’re capturing a likeness or not.

second state
Since I don’t really know what I look like, I can notice myself trying to compensate in different ways as I paint. Sometimes, if I think I’m being too complimentary, I’ll make myself look ghoulish and other times I indulge the impulse to idealize.

first state

In this case, I think that the earliest version probably looks most like me. The longer I worked on it, the more lean and well groomed I became. But, then again, maybe I’m being too hard on myself. Most of you will never know : )

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When I was in college, I had an assignment to do a self portrait and then do another based on the first one but at age 60. I saved the first drawing and when I was around 35 or so I decided to do another version of that drawing every year around my birthday to see how accurate my prediction was and to record the transition. I’ve not been absolutely disciplined about doing them every year and sometimes I’ve done a different pose or medium but I have enough to get a sense of where this is going.

Here are a few, starting with the original (done when I was 20) and ending with the one I did predicting what I would look like at 60. In between are, I think, 35, 40 and 50. Some of these have that ghoulish thing going on. I think it’s pretty clear, from the drawings, that at age twenty I had a very different idea of now old 60 was than I do now at 54.

I apologize for the poor quality of some of the reproductions.

Portrait in goauche and ink

3 1/2″ x 5″ gouache and ink

I found some painters whose figure work really excited me. I was inspired to do this portrait sketch.

Check out these two painters: Sandra Flood and Jenifer Balkin.

Haystack Rock

6″ x 8″ oil on canvas

Here’s a plein air oil version of the sketch in my last post. I’m finding it challenging to make the surf convincing.