Painting Class: Landscape

I finally finished the second painting I had begun during my painting class (which you can catch up on here if you've failed to read it thus far). It took longer than planned. This was because of the previously mentioned Doctor Who piece I was working on turning out to be rather more complicated than expected. That's finished too, and I'll be posting about it early in the new year.

Once that was done there was this little festive thing that came up called Christmas (you may have experienced this particular time-sink, fun though it is) as well as some curfuffle at work. That particular thing has yet to be resolved, but looks hopeful and should be sorted out by my birthday one way or another. If you have no idea where I work or what the issue is then I won't bore you with it, and if you do know then why would I tell you again?

Anyway, I finished the painting. I expect you'd like to see it?

To be fair, it does look moderately better in the flesh (as little as that says), but I've still yet to work out how to light pieces for good photography and I need a tripod.  I have got a swanky new camera though, so that's something.  It's based on this photograph by Chamberstock 

My wife wants to hang it somewhere.  I suggested face to the wall in the lavatory, but she's picked out pride of place in the living room instead.  I really am honestly baffled why people like my stuff most of the time, but I'm thankful for it too despite feeling awkward about the compliments; one day maybe it'll make me money when I'm too old to work on videogames because the technology confuses me, as DVR's do my grandparents.

Before I go on I need to say some things about the class, which I didn't last time as I was too busy wittering on about my cats (incidentally, Christmas Trees and cats - oh what a wonderful combination that isn't).

There were 11 of us in the class of wildly varying ages (I was not the youngest, nor the oldest, but toward the younger end of the spectrum) and predominantly X chromosomes (there were two guys in the group, one of whom was yours truly).  The styles were wildly varying, but I wouldn't say that anyone was really bad, just inexperienced - much like me.  Some of the art produced there was really wonderful, varying pieces putting me in mind of Hockney, Lowry and other artists who's work I know but names I don't.  Pretty good for a bunch of amateurs.  Good company to be in.

Our instructor was Paula McCartey (not to be confused with the Beatle, who is the wrong sex for starters), who kept quiet about her body of work until the end (not that it's hard to find these days) but turned out to be a very accomplished painter of some local renown (maybe more than local, I didn't go and ask around elsewhere).  Her daughter works in the same building as me it transpires, though I have yet to meet her that I know of.  Small town, big world.

I had to miss two weeks of the class unfortunately due to illness (mine and others) so I started the painting at home since I knew the subject was to be a landscape.  My wife printed up some photo sized landscape images of my choosing, and I went with the one that appealed most at the time.  The image above is me painting, obviously.

Naturally, being me I forgot to take a picture of it after the first stage of painting, so this is after the second.  You can see at the bottom that I'd started by just roughing in lines in blue on a lighter blue field.  I wanted some of that blue to show through the finished piece, I'm not sure it really did, but it made painting the sky easier.  After that I just started painting over the top.  I think I preferred this to using pencil (as I did with the rabbit) as it was less likely to muddy the paint that went over it.

I think this was the stage I had reached when I returned to the class.  Not much else to say about it, although it went down quite well with the other artists.  Oh, no, actually I'm remembering it wrong.  The water was painted before that class, but the cliffs weren't - this is at the end of that week's class.

And this is after the final class.  The color looks really good here - this may be as a result of the better lighting in the class' work area, or it might be because of the camera - this being taken by one of the other students (Thanks Suna!). I really don't know, but I'll take it.

I could have called it quits there I guess, but I really wanted it to feel a little more golden, and my brother sugested it looked like a hairy green woman lying down in a river , looking up from her feet. Once he'd said it I could see it as little else so I spent a final couple of hours on it after Christmas adding more fall colours and fog and detail before calling it finished.

and that's the end of my adventures in Painting Class.  Unless I do another, which I probably will at some point.  I need to come up with something to paint just for myself now though - not going to improve otherwise...

Sketching for November '12

And here is the second sketching post this month, which brings us all up to date on that until January. I still haven't got much juice back for additional sketching/speedpainting, though I have manage a little of both - most of it appalling. You still get to see it along the line though, because that's the entire point of the blog, yes? I'm also hoping to finish the painting I was working on at my painting class this week. That said I've meant to sit down and work on it for the past 3 days and haven't managed to, so we'll see if I can manage it.

Really though, I don't have a great deal to cover in this post, so I'll cut to the chase and get on with the images.

Free Sketching

Very little of real note here - mostly middle of the road stuff.  The woman in the top left (also the icon for this post) is somewhat disappointing since she looks good in my sketchbook, but terrible scanned (I think the sketch may have been a little light).  The rest very between good and almost terrible, though I'm really quite happy with the eye and the girls tu-tu.  On the left, under the woman, are two stylistic experiments - the man I just decided to draw quite narrow and quite liked the result, while the girl is clearly a ailed attempt at a more Manga look, but I think it's interesting enough to show.

Figure Practice

That the figures I'm predominantly showing here are female is mostly just a coincidence; I drew lots of guys too, but they were either so sketchy it wasn't worth scanning them or I'd done them too light to really make them out once I had scanned them.  None of them were particularly great anyway (though few of them were complete failures either).  Sketches of note here are the girl in the lower middle - this was a failed attempt at drawing a flat-chested woman - instead she looks like a woman with a guy-chest.  The woman in the lower right... I don't know what I was trying to draw - is she pregnant? bloated? infested with alien plague?  No idea, but it's an interesting visual nevertheless.

I still really need to get back to practicing hands and feet (and all the other anatomy in between).

From Reference

My Father-in-Law, Sister-in-Law and Chewbacca the dog (terrible likeness), along with "random dude in a restaurant," were the only things I really had to show after Thanksgiving (with one more in the failures below).  Not sure why, but it was particularly difficult to draw this year - fewer people moving around more or something, I don't know.  The other two sketches are based on Stock photographs from  PhotoStockMarket and im-stocking-you from DeviantArt.

Abject Failures

At first glance these may appear fairly respectable, but the person on the left looks like neither a guy nor a girl but somewhere creepily in between, the person in the middle was another experiment with style but turned out creepy instead of cool, and the right most sketch is of my Brother-in-Law but could not look less like him if I had tried.  So, while there are worse sketches in my sketchbook, these were definitely the most disappointing.  Yuck.

So, until the next time, have a Merry Christmas, or whichever seasonal alternative you celebrate   I'll probably not post until afterwards, but hopefully before the new year.

Sketching for October '12

I was going to do a mixed post for October and November's sketching, but then I forgot to scan November, so November will be a few days coming. I also had a post planned for the piece I've been working on over the last month, but the publishing got pushed back to January, so I'll write one then. I've finished that piece, and working on it, as well as some head expanding problems at work have left me little artistic mojo left over for much else. The piece is finished now though, so I can resume speedpainting guilt free. We'll see how many I can do between now and Christmas so I can cram another post into December to make up for the lost one.

Anyway, sketching. Didn't do much in October or November (as I've mentioned frequently), but there's enough for a quick post I think (albeit one with a mere three images). On we go then...

Free Sketching
So these were from October, as you may have gathered, that explains the presence of Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster here. I quite like the Monster - he ended up cute rather than menacing, and I am A-OK with that (though I guess I need to practice menacing lighting and expressions now). Vinnie Van Gough to The Monster's left was just some practice with facial hair and not intended as a portrait of the famous 1.5 eared impressionist (I hear his Napoleon was uncanny). Yes, another girl with Elf/Vulcan ears on the left there. I like pointy ears, they're cute. There's apparently a big fuss as as you can have your ears pointed surgically these days, and "All the kids are doing it, under the influence of Spock and Arwen!" etc. Good for them, it's certainly more attractive than those giant earning implants that stretch your ear lobes out like silly string - and unfortunately that's a lot more prevalent. if you have those ear implants don't be too offended, that's dandy, I'm happy for your choice, but I don't have to find it aesthetically pleasing either. I should probably do a proper pointy eared painting soon and get it out of my system.

Figure Drawing Practice
Not much of any real note here. I clearly still need to work on hands a lot, and all that stuff I learned about arms recently has apparently already escaped me. I'll be working on more anatomical studies from reference over the next month or so, so hopefully things will improve a little. I am fairly please with the back on the guy to the right, and the girl to his left (except her witch hand and his stumpy legs), but there's clearly a long way to go here.

Failures
OK, so only 2 of these are out and out disasters, the others have some merits but are still failures over all. The upper half of the girl on the left is pretty good, and I quite like her head and hair, but the lower half. oops. The Bat-mobile looks OK in a retro kinda 60's way, but my son told me it was terrible. When a 5 year old thinks your Bat-mobile is terrible you may as well believe them, they know their Bat-mobiles.

And that's it for today, short but sweet (I have a headache coming on or I'd waffle more). More to follow, probably next weekend.  In the meantime, here's a pointless picture of the Lego space fighter I built for my son, a sort of mini "Daddy can you?"