Night

A painting based on a sketch I did while waiting in the car.  My feeling? meh...though I find it an interesting challenge, I haven't done a whole lot of night sketching.  Need to do more.

figures again

I sorted through pretty much all my work over the last couple of years, threw out a lot of crap, and am posting some of the things that don't suck too bad.  That in mind, here are some more figures from workshop:

Hollow

..and bad teeth.

Alpine hut

Another study from a while ago based off a fantastic photo my brother-in-law took.  I think this turned out pretty good by and large..though I feel the treatment of the trees is not all that great.

clouds

Among other things, I've been working on clouds...as it is not my usual predilection, this is also good high-key (that is, an image with predominantly lighter values) practice for me.

Also, just got a couple of new brushes which I'm really liking...a 14 round and 1/2" flat from Escoda, both synthetic Kolinsky...I have a couple of others from Escoda which are also quite nice synthetics, and which I still quite like, but these new ones seem to hold more pigment and are a little less stiff.

Taiwan (九份) study

A street scene from the mountain town of Jiu Fen, this was a large (for me) study from a few months ago.  I'm pretty happy with it - I think a lot of things kind of came together the right way...surprisingly!  Watercolor with a bit of gouache where things got out of control.  A lot of wet into wet, and wet into damp.

I was using my new big squirrel hair mop brush for the first time and it was terrifying and exhilerating.  Neat brush - you can load a ton of pigment in it for large area washes, but at the same time the tip holds a really nice point for details.  I figure this is a good brush for broad yet sufficiently detailed/controlled strokes in the initial phase of a painting..maybe a little further too...Must do more of this sort of thing...

Bela Lugosi is Dead

Fantastic song, and a great cover of it by this band (excellent live clip here).  This version of the song was the jumping off point for these paintings.

A few years back I got to participate in a group show curated by a friend of mine.  The theme kind of revolved around hot rods and pin up gals and that sort of thing, and as I thought Nouvelle Vague's take on it was evocative, I kind of ran with it.   After dithering forever, I came up with this:

..I actually was fairly pleased with how it turned out, but ultimately I decided it felt too literal for the genre, so I redid it.  Here is a final rough:

I've always liked the graphic poster look, and gouache of course lends itself very well to it.  I was in such a rush to redo it that I never did photograph the final.  Happily though, it ended up selling.