july challnge 29, 30 & 31

july challnge 27 & 28

july challnge 25 & 26

july challnge 23 & 24

july challnge 21 & 22

july challnge 19 & 20

july challnge 17 & 18

july challnge 15 & 16

july challnge 13 & 14

july challnge 11 & 12

july challnge 9 & 10

july challenge 7 & 8

july challenge 5 & 6

july challenge 3 & 4

One head per day in July art challenge days 1 & 2

Inspired by my wife's art-per-day endeavour last month, I decided I should do the same along side. 

I decided on heads because honestly I'm not really that great with faces, especially when it comes to accuracy and likeness.  I can usually suggest facial features in basic shapes and indications during quick sketches, but I rarely spend more than a couple of minutes.  And they can often come across as a little cartoony or exaggerated (hard to take the animator out of me, heh heh!).  My second goal was to further explore/push what I might accomplish with watercolors.  Again, it came down to the fact that I often get results I'm pleased with in quick sketches, whereas my longer (20 minute) sketches tend to be inferior.  I'm referring particularly to figure drawing workshop here.

So who were my subjects?  Some time ago, I had had this idea of doing portraits of my favorite tertiary characters from various TV series.  These characters would ideally have been those that, though not featuring prominently in the show, but whose actors/actresses somehow were able to bring an discernable personality in their brief appearances.  As this list is pretty limited in size, I ended up expanding it to include some characters that feature in ensemble casts.  Finally, because our viewing tastes are pretty eclectic, Scandinavian  and British actors/actresses are over-represented here!

All in all even though a lot of these are truly awful (good lord!), and more often than not have a poor likeness, there are a handful that turned out ok, and I have certainly learned a lot handling watercolor as well as details to note about the head.

Here are the first two:

Unfairly Persecuted Monster

Inspired by someone or other...

The original version was more humanoid.

Shapes

Over the last few months, a friend of mine and I have been doing a little drawing/design exercise where we start with a random shape and try and make something out of them.  Once the shape is established, you can turn in any which way to find something to make of it.  It has been very interesting and surprising what we each come up with sometimes.  Here are a few of them:

 While my friend has bowed out for now, I am continuing for a while to see what happens.

figure drawing again

Been really busy trying to finish up a project, so my last three Sargent studies have taken a back seat.  Nonetheless, I've been trying to get to drawing workshop when I have a chance, and it's a good enough way to blow off steam at the end of the week.  Practice is practice!

It occurs to me that I seem to get good results painting the model from the rear, and I think it's partly because broader and in some cases more simple shapes.  This suggests to me a need to move to a smaller brush maybe for detail work? Or be more deliberate when handling smaller details as with the head and face.

figure drawing

10 minutes.  Was trying out a new naples yellow watercolor.

Sargent day 27

Pretty happy with this one if I ignore the shapeless cherubim that form the base of the fountain, haha! All told probably not more than an hour not including waiting for things to dry.  Also did some reductive stuff in places that went too dark, though it's a little small to really have much control.

Sargent day 26

I'm fairly pleased with this one, possibly because it was more explicitly an exercise in drawing as opposed to painting. 

Sargent day 25

I guess I'm going to go until 30 at least, but then I'll take a break from these copies.  I feel I'm getting a little bogged down and not gleaning as much from these recently.  Not because there's nothing to glean, but because I'm losing focus a little.

Sargent day 24

Complex - kind of lost focus on this one.  Blah!

Sargent day 23

High key has always been a weakness of mine, so this one was intimidating - a particular challenge.  Yikes!  Although I think the curtains turned out better than I had hoped, the value/color of the boats and such outside went too dark/saturated.

back to Sargent (day 22)

We interrupt this program...

...for some figure painting.  I think these were 5 minute poses..

I almost like how the feet turned out.

Sargent day 21

Again, light values not quite light enough, and lack the color intensity of the original.  I do suspect he used some gouache in the folds of the dress though, which I haven't bothered to do.