Face, Finished

Stop me if I've said this before.... I hate hair.  Hair is so hard to paint.  I feel like I am never gonna get it.  I thought I might have been onto something with the hair on this painting, but then.... no.  What you see on this is mostly done with watercolor pencil.    I put on a basic color of the hair, then tried putting in some detail with the brush. Err, grrrr, huh.  Terrible!  So then I tried to fix it a bit with watercolor pencil.   I guess that it isn't too bad, but I wouldn't say that it's good either.

Ok, lets get off the hair and try to look a little more critically.  I tried to get a little color in the whites of the eyes.  and I guess I did that, but they still look flat.  The lips fell a bit flat too.  Maybe a bit of highlight with my favorite white pencil would help that.  I don't know.  I do like how the ball of the nose is.  Can't believe that that is my favorite part of the painting.  LOL.   I  just think thats kinda funny.
Well, hope you enjoy it.

Face WIP

Trying to get back into painting again after a month off.  I think I've said that before.  And I don't really have any specific thing that I want to paint, so on a whim I decided to paint a face.  I've seen lots of portraits that look absolutely fantastic, and then I look at mine and they usually, well.... don't look fantastic.  The best luck I've had with faces is many really light, transparent layers.  Usually, I don't have the patience for that kind of nonsense.

For me it seems like I put on a few light layers, here, a little there..... then.... BAMMO!!  Whoops, too thick, or too heavy, or too opaque.  Then I've got a painting that looks like a 3rd grader did it.  Hmmm.  well, what to do?  Maybe with a little  work, and a lot of luck, I can conquer that whole, glob the paint on thing.  

With this painting, I've got lots of layers on it.  Really thin!  I put on some, then take some off, then put some on, then try to make the gradient go to nothing.  Then repeat.  Even having done this, I've made some major mistakes, but thats ok.  I don't pretend to be perfect, and I certainly don't pretend that my paintings are.

I've forsaken the brush on this picture in lieu of watercolor pencil on several places on this painting.  I'm sure you will be able to pick the places out quite easily.  Again, that's ok.   This is a WIP (Work In Progress).  I don't know if the watercolor pencil will still be visible when I am totally finished or not.  If they are, good, if they aren't, that's good too.

Well, I haver too much sometimes.  Err, well, maybe I don't.  Maybe you all want to hear about this.  No, definitely havering.  With that..... I'm out.

Statue, Finished

Ok.   Its finished.  I know I didn't add a lot more too it.  I'd have finished it yesterday, but i ran out of time.  I like this painting, and I hope everyone who sees it does too.

For anyone who is interested in seeing the other paintings in this months challenge, here is a link.

For anyone interested in seeing the original picture I used as inspiration, here is that link.

Buckets of Apples

Since I'm in the "Heavy Metal" challenge this month, I decided to paint a few more metal pictures.  I think that I get carried away trying to make my painting look "right."  Whatever that means.  In so doing, I end up putting a lot more paint on paper than I want to, and my paintings lose some of the transparency, or lightness that I want to keep.  I want to get to a place where very few washes will satisfy what I want the painting to look like, and then to stop fiddling.  I'm not there, but I'm still working to get there.

Hope you enjoy these fun little paintings.

Statue WIP

So, I got involved in a challenge this month.  The theme of the challenge is "Heavy Metal."  I have a chance to pick from about 200 pictures, each with something else metal in it.  I've painted a few statues before, and rather like painting the aged metal or granite.  I don't care for the background of the original picture, so I decided to take artistic license and change it up a bit.  I want it to look like it is dark around the statue, but the statue itself it lit up.  So, I put in, or am putting in a darker blue/grey background.  We'll see how it turns out  when I am totally done with it.