Katya Izabel Filmus

Katya Izabel Filmus

Self Portrait (cont)

Just updating with more progress on my self portrait. It still needs some work. I'm not completely happy with the current state of the hair and the trousers and feet need some work, as does the camera arm. Otherwise I'm very happy with it! It all just worked straight away. I've never painted body hair or facial hair or eyebrows and my last attempts at head hair and eyebrows were a dreadful blobby affair.

I have a summer project to finish next which I need to think about planning and completing before I continue with any more painting. I do really want to carry on experimenting with the pattern fields and grids as soon as I can really.

Last year's acrylic self portrait

My almost finished oil painting

Self Portrait in Oil

I spent a couple of days thinking about how to go about a self portrait. I wanted to do something a bit different but at the same time I want to develop my skills and get used to painting people so I was sort of torn between going for something really surreal or stylized or abstracted. I had a look on deviantart but it was mostly either very traditional (sometimes very good though) or very cheesy (but also sometimes very good in that case too!).

I'd taken a few pics of myself from different angles and stuff over the couple of days too and ended up going with one with weird perspective and where I hadn't washed or showered for a like 5 days (I'd been in Leeds getting stoned and going out drinking) and liked how rough I looked. All blotchy and dark around the eyes and the sun was hurting my eyes when I looked up at the camera so I look pretty frowny and strange.

Aaaanyways... Here it is so far... I ended up actually ditching the being clever and interesting with it and just tried to go for a more realistic approach. It's still probably got 10-15 hours work to be done on it, I think... Maybe a bit less. There's still work to do on the basic shading on the face, the nose needs to be slightly less long, I need to do the feet (especially since I have trainers on in the photo and I want bare feet! That'll be a bit awkward to try and fix), shade the trousers, do the background, touch up the arm, paint in my nipple, add some more blotches and odd freckles, finish the hair and shade it and... yeah. It's so much easier than making proper art though. You can just zone out and not think about it at all. Abstract painting is much harder!

09/09/11

08/09/11

07/09/11

A few bits

Decent pic of the finished oil painting

This is a barbarian/viking thing. I'm not sure he knows what he's supposed to be.

More experimentation

Finished oil practice

This actually turned out really well! I blocked in a load of white for a lot of the background which gave it a bit of a cheesy dream sequence feel but I really wanted to get it done so I could exhibit it at the Abbey. I'm not sure whether it's cool to exhibit wet paintings... :S I've taped it to the back of another canvas so only the edges will get fucked during transport and I can give them a rough touch up with oils when I get to Leeds. It'll be reet.

Anyway. Here it is. It's a shit blurry picture but the light is terrible again because it's night time. :/ I'll snap it again in Leeds tomorrow morning. :)

Oil painting practice

I just started this this evening. I'm just getting myself familiar with oils. I spent the afternoon and last night trawling for stock photos on deviantart but a lot of the ones I wanted to use had awkward conditions for use. Eventually I went with this one. It hasn't been overly messed with and doesn't have a pouty posed model. It's also relatively clear and looks quite natural and I quite like it.

I didn't get on till quite late. I had to pull myself away from it because if I work too late I end up not being able to sleep till like 7 the next day.

(My slightly cheeky way of seeing where I'm going wrong with her head for when I start tomorrow)

Rough outline

More works of interest

Ollie Watson

Mario Pires Cordeiro

Geoff Diego Litherland

Jonothan Lasker

Dennis Hollingsworth

I like these but the little spiky things kinda ruin them a little bit, I think.

Aleksandra Domanovic

It's a cube

Looking at this stirs feelings of revulsion. It's a cube. I don;t normally feel revulsion when I look at cubes. I actually quite like them. I'm maing an exception for this one. It's also glowing because I realised you could sort of smear and blend oil in interesting ways and couldn't resist playing with that.

Aaanyways.

Cuuuuuube:

I also gave this other painting a bit of a touch up this morning

Katzen! finished

I thought I'd already put this up but apparently not. I finished it. :)

First oil Painting

I did this remarkably quickly. It's a very small painting but it would have probably taken me twice as long with acrylics because they dry all the time and you end up having to remix the same colours over and over. I found them much easier to work with than acrylics. You can adjust the tone of colours already on the canvas just by blending other colours into the ones already present which is ace!

I've had some work on Etsy for a while and they haven't sold. I know it's because of the price tag but I'm not going to sell my work for less than minimum wage. If i can complete paintings in this short amount of time or less then I can try and sell them (although not this one. It's a gift) online much cheaper and hopefully have a little bit of extra money to support myself in Falmouth.

Painting Disaster... But here's some art images I like instead. :)

I spent half of today and last night trawling for decent stock photos to work from. Started a painting this afternoon and then decided I didn't like any of the images I'd found and scrapped it. Oh well! Here's some tastey art images, anyway.

Keith Kawai

Dan Holdsworth

James Sienna

Jennifer Coates

Miguelacp

Eugene Von Bruenchenhein

Katzen!

I've been planning on working on my painting real things skills for ages but haven't been able to think of anything that would be fun to do. I spied this pic on deviantart that I really liked so I thought I'd have a bash at it. I'm still working on it but here are some progress pics. :) It looks terrifying to begin with... I almost abandoned it at that point because I was so annoyed at myself for making that much of a mess.

Black, White, Red, Blue, Yellow, Green

An experiment I did this afternoon. It combines the colour scheme from my elastic things with the doodles I did over the last week. It's a bit rough round the edges but I still like it. I may do a series of these. They are quite quick to do although the wilko's yellow is a pain and needs a million coats.

I may do some more of these yet though.

I've just got back from a week (and a bit) in Leeds. I didn't really get much art done there even though I was definitely in the mood. I figured it would be a bit silly doing loads of painting and then having to carry it to Chesterfield. I did do some little doodles though. Little squares with simple line patterns and compositions in them. I was reading some guides to composition recently and one of the things that I found interesting was a comment about patterns. One of the things that you have to be careful of when painting is not to turn your abstract painting into a "pattern". If you do then the whole thing will read as one object rather than a composition of objects. There are some artists that actually work like this on purpose, making the painting itself an art object rather than a picture of art objects.

Anyway. I'm rambling. But the "art as object" thing is definitely something I'm going to consider. These are my doodles. Some of them are a bit shaky as they were done on the bus and some were done when I was a bit tipsy.

I'll try and keep building on this catalogue of tiny line drawings

more slightly less relevant doodles from the past week

It could be worth taking inspiration from these and doing a bunch of tiny paintings inspired by  these and the mono drawings.