skip a few weeks... what I am working on now

A diptych of Ben and Tom - enjoying the internet (on blogger in fact) in a coffee shop (Thanks to Trey for the suggestion!). Here are my digital value and then color studies. I'll do these as oil paintings (as always!), and want to retain the abstract, flat sense of design. It will be new and interesting for me, I am tired of both copying and rendering (especially after the last project where I painted the damn thing to death at least 5 times over and still didn't end up with what I wanted).

I would like to think that I can really work something and acheive a sense of light and space that is developed and mature, with a mature sense of history in the paint - but apparently I can acheive only overworked crap or overly photographic rendering. Freshness comes without finish for me, and with speed. So, I am not going to fight it and am going to do these as fast as possible, probably in one shot. That makes sense for illustration work, anyhow.




This is the color study for a third portrait, of Angelina Jolie, that I had planned. I wanted to show her as a humanitarian volunteer and UN ambassador instead of a glamorous hollywood sex symbol. The image would have been painted very loosely and flat, loosing some of the detail even that I had put into the study. Style aside, I am a little unsatisfied with it for being too close to an image that a photographer could just set up and do as a photoshoot. It got canned this morning during crit anyhow. The instructors pointed out that this image doesn't really accomplish the message, though they liked the image itself. After consideration, I agree.

Since my last post I have done two assignments - a portrait of Saul Williams, and the other an interior scene of a diner for "blue plate special".