Some Little Paintings

Acrylics on cold pressed water color paper....

Detail of Vamp

A recent digital painting.  You can see the whole thing on my Facebook page.

One Handed

I've recently had an injury to my non-dominant hand and wrist which has made completing daily tasks quite difficult.  I am able, though, to paint and draw, and have been doing that quite a bit as I heal.  This is a new series called 'Beach Club', perhaps due to time spent at the family beach house last month, and the fact that I'm still clinging to summer.  It seems so short each year.

Evolution of a face

While making my digital paintings, I will either start painting over a rough scanned sketch, or start from scratch.  If I can't get the face right, I'll turn it upside down, or put it in a monochromatic scale to reduce the distractions that my brain wants to see (which are not there).  It doesn't always work, but when it does, I'm happy.  You can see one such evolution here.  There were, of course, many steps in between each thumbnail I've shown.

Once I get the face finalized, I play with adding background detail/texture, and/or color.

More Details!!

Another from the same 'Royals' series.  The hustle and bustle of the season is slowing down personal art time, but here's some of the latest ....

Details, Please!

Part of me likes the nondescript, generalized rendition of the 'details' in my paintings: the 'placeholder' brushstrokes used to indicate hair, or accessories, or clothing which I start out with and paint over with more and more accuracy as I go on.  Another part of me feels impelled to continually add more realism each time I sit back down to paint more.

The need to show this increased detail may come from somewhat of a lack of confidence on my part, as well as a need to see if I can render certain parts more realistically so that I will not be judged as someone less skilled than I might otherwise be assessed.  I'm generally less comfortable showing my 'looser' work without explanation - - that it's somehow intentional, and that while I am capable of painting more realistically, ["better" ?] I just happen to prefer this particular work the way I have it ["unskilled" ?].  I hope that will go away in time, both the lack of confidence, and the fear of simplicity.

Above are details of a recent painting (which I showed in a sepia version in the last post).  I'm not done with the jewelry, I have much more to do.  See the sepia version for a general sense of how it looked before.

Thursday's Screenshot

Work on my 'Stepchildren' series continues.  I start with a scanned sketch, paint in Adobe Photoshop, all on separate layers.  When a file gets to be a certain number of layers, say, 15 or so, I save a flattened version, rename it with a numerical suffix, and continue to the next 15 layers, and so on.  The face and features change a lot during this process.   And as you can see, I often have a few windows open at the same time.  The redhead on the left is the preview in Adobe Bridge of another painting I've done.

'The Stepchildren' Series

I'm currently working on a series of redheads, all painted digitally with my Wacom tablet.  In the end, I'll compile them into a small book or maybe even a 'zine' called "The Stepchildren".  

Boop-Boopee-Doo!

Some time back I doodled a bunch of cutesie 'flapper' looking girls.  If you've seen my Facebook Page, you may have seen this particular pencil sketch.  I'm working on digitally painting a large scan of this sketch with variations in the oval frame and background.  The hair is still rough, as are a lot of the features.   Thought I'd share my progress so far.

Details of "Girl with Pearl"