Portrait study of Les

As the weather turns colder I find I'm painting my favorite subject more and more, people. Most of these paintings are quick oil studies done lately at my local malls and cafes. No one seems to mind that I'm creating these tiny figure studies or notices. Also, I've returned to the Palette and Chisel where there is always a model to paint as well as several truly amazing artists to observe. This portrait study was done at the P&C. I find after quickly figuring my size and placement through shadow, I zoom in on the nose and eyes.

just a thought to share

"Fall Walk" oil 8"x6" (sold)
Ran out in the afternoon to try to catch the sunshine because who knows how many sunny days we have left!

If it's not happening on my palette, it's definitely not happening on my painting. What I mean is that my palette has to be load with large blobs of paint squished out and lined-up in my prefer order. And then I need to mix up big puddles of my starting values and arrange it on my palette so that my lights stay on one side and darks stay on their side. Also, if my palette becomes disorganized or looks barely touched, nothing good is happening on the canvas. It's as if my palette is an inner-reflection of the paint process. So of course after struggling with a studio piece for days and having to scrape it away repeatedly, I happened to actually see what was going on my palette and saw that absolutely nothing was going on. I needed to squeeze out a lot more fresh paint as I barely had anything left and the puddles of value I had mixed were nearly non-existent. After correctly this problem my painting started to take shape and the idea in my head was becoming visually evident.

2 Values

As always, my primary concern is value and temperature. So last week I spent my time in Scottsdale, under the tutelage of Peggi Kroll Roberts, studying the figure, well actually - value and temperature. We had 5-15 minutes per pose to lay in the basic shapes and say it in two values. One value for the lights and one value for the shadows. I spent the bulk of my time mixing a puddle of paint for my light value and another puddle for my dark value. With the clock running out, I quickly painted the pose. Towards the end of the week I managed to add temperature changes while being careful not to alter my established two values. After the designated time there was often a costume change and always a pose change. Studying the figure in this manner for five days was a great learning experience and I feel I walked away better able to find and simplify the most important shapes, values, and temperature.