Eating well... with Still Life Pastels!

trying out the large Prismacolor pastel sticks.
Fun!

first attempts with watercolors! a cool palette to begin...

maybe something a bit more daring? :)

a dash of color

Came across some pastel exercises from last year!

copying from the guys who knew what they were doing :) 

from a Suerrat sketch! the rest are Monets

Pastel Landscapes

Practicing with pastel pencils! 

I've never done landscapes before.. hopefully progress can be seen :)

- the bottom most pic is the first attempt, the top one here is the latest -

Wish  we had such wonderful views here, but all these are inspired by photos, courtesy of my good friend Ira, who went on an amazing hiking trip through Germany, Austria and Italy.
more to come soon!

Pastels

just letting you know, figure drawing isn't everything I've been doing lately.. it's just that the other stuff isn't so "post-able". I've been studying pastels, so for now it's all just basic exercises:

another way to learn is copying from the masters:  Degas, John Singer Sargent (with an altered palette) and some Klimt :) those guys really knew how lay some color!

Paintings without paint - hooray!

More retro-updates! now meshed together with recent updates.

This is the first painting assignment, where we:
1. develop an exterior layout into three different tonals
2. pick one tonal of the three and develop it into three different color versions
3. pick one color study of the three and go to a final big version with it.

Luckily for brush-o-phobic me, no actual painting had to be involved, just a traditional medium.

i went for color pencils:

final:

... Fast-forwarding one year (during which no painting took place on my end :P), here's the 2010 version of the same assignment.
This time Mike was kind enough to let me develop each tonal into one color study, instead of picking one tonal and coloring it in three variations:

(the big shape in the left lower corner is a tree top! too bad it looks like stylized flames about to devour the poor chair, table and entire scene whole..)

Instead of going back to the comfort zone of color pencils, i tried an ink wash for the first time, to set the tones, and went over that with the pencils afterward:


I found the ink gave the scene a slightly more somber, toned-down atmosphere:


yay! ok, on to the next project...

PAIN-ting projects

... selected from year 1

* Still life in gouache


YES, the perspective on the can is ALL wrong, but fixing it would be jeopardizing my sanity, which hangs by a thread as it is, especially when it comes to painting...


- Our next to last project of the year, the first part of which is the Master Copy - we pick an artist and copy one of his works.
This one is from Arthur Rackham's illustrations for "The Niebelungen". i don't have a picture of the original at the moment, but you can see the photocopy from a book on the right, and my colored copy on the left.



... The second part of the assignment was to adopt the above-mentioned artist's style or at least part of it that you like, and apply it to an original composition, which will be based on a book excerpt describing an interior.
So i picked the renovated house and courtyard (half-interior..) of the Buendia family from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude".

This is the under-drawing and some of the preliminary work:


I took a picture of it before applying the gouache since i usually prefer the black and white version, naturally assuming i'm going to ruin it with color :P


and this is the final version (still not really done..) - i used led pencil, dark umber colored pencil, gouache and ink, as was done in the Rackham copy: