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.

Starbucks

A very clean, more commercial looking painting. Kept vaguely to the project but as this is a gift I've tried to keep it relatively broad and decorative.

Fields of colour fields

Not exactly what I had in mind for the next stage but it was good fun. Much easier that I thought too. I always look at pieces like this and am in awe at the artists understanding of colour.

I've gone for a sort of easy on the eye, could fit in with your decor somewhere approach as this is more of a gift for someone than a conceptual or exploratory piece although I did learn from it. Some of the colours need switching to make it work totally and some need a second coat. I really want to do the background as vertical stripes of the same colour scheme to see how they interact but that could end up being a bit mad for the person who's present it is' taste.

The top one is how it's been completed so far and the bottom 3 are just me playing around with possible colourings in photoshop.

2 tone field drawings

Tonight I had a bit of a play with gel pens again. I love working with gel pens. The ink sits on the page like paint and comes out of the pen at a consistent thickness and tone making you have to draw in a certain way. My recent paintings have been very much influenced by working with gel pens, especially the vertical lined backgrounds.

Illustrators working with just black ink have to employ various techniques to build up tone, such as cross hatching, repeating straight lines, scribbling, repeating dots (stippling) or circles in a grid or isometric pattern or even more loosely and randomly.

I like to play around with these in more experimental ways. Changing the size and thickness and direction of these tonal marks can suggest form or distance. I have played around with this quite a lot.

I'm very interested in what happens when you use these marks which are used to create the illusion of tone in a more abstract way. For example, using these instead of colour in the instance of colour field painting:

  

Kenneth Noland: Drought

Mark Rothko: Black on Maroon

These "colour fields" could easily be "texture fields" or "tonal fields" or "pattern fields". It's something I plan to play around with over the coming weeks.

I did some rough freehand gel pen drawings this evening to try out some 2 tone textured field drawings. I also played with them in photoshop to try seeing how colour might interact with them in various ways.