Practice on Magnets

I have painted a few other portraits recently. The tips I got from Aaron Coberly's class have been helpful, but I still struggle with spending way too much time blending and focusing on details before I should. I found some 8x8" magnetic canvases that I've been practicing on. Here are a few of them.

Second portrait of my daughter

I am finally coming out of the morning sickness phase so I have been feeling well enough to putz around with art. My mother in law told me that she would like a portrait of my daughter for Christmas, so I made an attempt.

First Figure Painting Class

This month I took my first oil painting class with Aaron Coberly. Specifically, it was "Painting the Alla Prima Figure". Aaron Coberly's style looks very loose and almost chaotic to me. Yet he somehow manages to pull it together to create beautiful and intriguing portraits. I really like it and I originally thought I wouldn't have too much trouble mimicking what he does and getting decent results. What hubris on my part. The class made me realize blending and rendering things nicely is not exactly important, and that is what I tend to focus on. One reason Aaron Coberly has such nice results is that he is very accurate in terms of feature and shape placement - he doesn't spend his time slowly blending one color to the next like I try to do.

I learned a lot in the class and I've been trying to apply what he taught to some drawings:

First Portrait Painting

Out of the blue, I thought it would be neat to try my hand at oil painting. I got fed up with making a digital painting, sending it to the printers and having it arrive different than anticipated - many times too dark. With oil painting, what you see is what you get. Plus, spending some time away from a computer screen could be good for me.

So I made my first attempt - a 24x24" portrait of my daughter.

It was definitely an overly ambitious attempt - 24x24" is not a small canvas and I didn't have the first idea how to handle oil paints. I was lucky it turned out as nicely as it did. The pose, composition, and aspect ratio worked well. However, there are lots of problems with it. The ear and neck are incorrectly drawn and rendered. There is also something odd about the eye. Probably the thing that strikes me as most amature-ish is the washed out, monochromatic color of the skin. I really like this painting, but there is lots of room for improvement.