A portrait in ink. I've found myself doing many more portraits and figures over the past few months. So, the handful of regular visitors to the blog will be seeing more people in my art than cars or landscapes if you haven't already. I am, however, trying to remedy that at least on the landscape side. We'll see how that works out.
I don't post a lot of drawings or sketches - mainly because most of them are very rough value sketches for watercolor paintings. But, some end up getting finished as pretty decent little drawings in their own right. This one finished up a lot better than most.
I've been trying to do more figures that were dressed and going about regular daily activities. This girl seemed perfect, although I rarely use much true yellow. I feel like I should have used a more contrasting background color. But, maybe the lighter neutral helps preserve the light airy-ness of the subject.
Here's what I consider an everyday figure. I think it would be interesting to do some portraits/figures of people (mostly women) going through normal daily activities in keeping with the "art of the ordinary" theme I've tried to keep going since I started painting.
This is a fairly quick little portrait of my daughter's cat. I've never done a pet portrait, but the reference photo jumped out at me when my daughter posted it somewhere on social media. The lighting, colors and personality of the cat all came together. Maybe I'll try some more. It turned into a nice gift for my daughter's birthday yesterday.
This figure is one of my favorite paintings of the year. Everything about her turned out exactly as or better than planned. The nearly monochrome color palette draws attention to the highlights and pulls you to the focal point, her face. The obvious raw drawing at the bottom and the seamless bleeding of her skirt into the background create an abstraction that highlights the realism of the rendering of the rest of her form. This one is a culmination of almost everything I've been working on. I really couldn't be happier with this one.
This is a quick portrait painted in watercolor on a gouache-tinted sheet. I restated the drawing with charcoal pencil after the paint was dry to emphasize it. Leaving part of the portrait unpainted draws the viewers attention both to the painted focal point and to the abstract nature of a two-dimensional rendering.
I guess I'll call this a street portrait or street figure. I brought a lot together in this one. Lightest light against the darkest dark. Dark background against the lit side of the subject and no background against the shadow side. New color mixes for skintone. This one worked out in so many ways I think it's become a new standard for which to aim.