I have fallen back into one of my earlier ways of painting: I make a mark or a stroke with my brush and then decide what to do next. Each mark I make inspires the next. My idea of the finish painting shifts as the marks and strokes progress. Sometimes I make a leap, that […]
I began today’s experiment with an arc of yellow. Then I completed the rest of the head skeleton with that same color. I chose an appropriate blue to merge with the yellow to create an acceptable green. I also applied some blue directly, for eyebrow and lip strokes. I put this aside for a while; […]
I planned to reverse the process of finding faces in clouds by creating faces and hiding them in my painted clouds. It’s harder than it seems. There are a couple of half-formed faces in this abstract, and plenty of half-formed clouds. It seems there is a cut-away, a cross section of a dark cloud that […]
My paintings so far this year have a limited range of colors. This happened because I used small bowls of paint to mix my color and I have more than enough for a single work. I don’t like to throw away paint, so I use the left overs on the next sketch. I remembered that I […]
I scaled up from 7×5″ to 12×16″.
The palette I used for this portrait is the same as yesterday’s.. I used complementary colors to represent the half of the face in light (red) and the half in shadow (green). I know I need more ideas that using highly contrasting colors to represent light and shadow, to make progress in portraiture.
I started this sketch without refreshing my knowledge of abstract portraiture. All I had in mind was to contrast the bright side of the face with that in shadow. I used the complementary colors, red and green to do this. After blocking the main features with reds, reddish browns and greens, I filled in the […]
Sometimes I have trouble focusing on the book I am reading. The image below is my solution for the problem of picturing lack of concentration. The portrait is more or less conventional. I’m not sure I got the eye rolling quite right, but they certainly are not focused on the book. I wonder if there […]
Today’s experiment is derivative of yesterday’s. In fact, it began as a canvas to test a blue-yellow combination. Sometimes blue and yellow pigments combine to give a muddy appearance (see Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green). I like the abstract feel of this portrait. It reminds me of my father. But it also struck another […]
The seed image for this experiment was a memory of my father playing the violin. Dad loved music. He would conduct the radio when the Saturday Texaco Metropolitan Opera with Milton Cross would come on; he would play the violin with passion and the piano…. well, he tried. Here is the first pass: It is […]
