Stopped by a local gathering yesterday to watch people at their Bar-B-Q, and made a few sketches. They were from some Real Estate business, and yes, there was a live bull. That’s Texas.

Well, I’ve got my initials on it so I guess that means I’m done. Will let it sit for a while and likely touch up a few spots later.

To make that texture in the top wall I found a piece of paper packing material that had a sponge like texture, so I used that to dab the paint on for the rough look, and then glazed over it to soften the values. The lettering was added by printing out the photo reference to size, rubbing pastel on the back and transferring it to the surface. I painted over the lines with medium to set it in place. I matched the wall color to the photos I had taken that was a bright blue, but I drove by the building yesterday and noticed that it was more of a moss green (chromium oxide) shade, so I had to repaint it, carefully painting around the lettering. That was a challenge.

I’ve been helping a friend finish up a digital project, so I can now finally get back to working the old fashioned way. The city where I live has held a competition that focuses on local architecture that I have entered a couple times in the past. This year’s entry is due in a few weeks, so hopefully I can get this one wrapped up in time. It’s based on a building where the local theatre group performs.

The piece is in acrylic on panel, 16×20″. I’ve been looking at online art of the Pont-Aven school Synthetists; Bernard, Gauguin, and Serusier, for inspiration. I love the way they use color with outlined shapes. I began with a light grey outline drawing, then colored in the base colors that I washed over with a thin layer of red oxide. So far I’ve got the sky and tree foliage painted in, and will move on the the building next.

Playing around with a scribbley style of shading in these pencil portraits. They’re taken from some videos I found of various blues performers.

Here’s the latest on my new painting. I’ve used gouache as the paint medium. The plan was to focus on her face, and have everything else be very loose paint. I’m going to have to set it aside and study it for a while to see if I want to do more with her hair, but for now it’s mission accomplished.

It’s a new month, so time to get back to painting. Hopefully I can make more than one a month. This one is based on a phot of mine that I took of my friend, Kaley. It’s on a ceramic tile panel I made a while back that’s 9 x 12″. What you’re seeing now is the first stage that’s a thin undertone I’ve made using brown and black inks to rough in the shapes and overall values. I have a general idea of how I want the finished image to look that’s a little different than what I typically do. We’ll see if I can stick to that, or if I swing back to familiar techniques as I go along. Essentially, I’m trying to loosen up a bit.

I just finished this charcoal drawing trying out a different technique. The idea was to start with a toned mid-value surface made with pigment, wipe and scrape away to the lighter values, and draw in the darker shades. The surface I chose was a sheet of illustration board that had been coated previously with several thin layers of thinned air-dry clay. The source image is a photo I found online of the actor Lee Marvin in a scene from The Twilight Zone series.

I created a base tone using a black soft pastel stick, and rubbed that to a midrange value with a paper towel. I then lightly sketched in the figure in charcoal, and filled everything in. The rough brushed surface of the paper wasn’t quite as easy to work with as I imagined, but it came out okay, just required more effort to get the values right. Not sure the likeness of Mr. Marvin is quite there, but that’s okay.

I picked up a set of General’s Peel & Sketch Charcoal Pencils a couple days ago. The unique feature of these pencils is a string that runs underneath the outer coating. When you pull down on the string you can release a strip of the coated paper, exposing more of the charcoal. I have some wax based “China” pencils that have this feature, but this is the first time I’ve seen it in a charcoal pencil. I had thought that this would allow me get a nice sharp point with a knife, but the charcoal is too brittle; although, it feels more dense than willow charcoal sticks. I have to use a piece of sandpaper, like the emery board in the 2nd picture above. That process works fine. The set comes with three density grades: hard, medium, and soft, but I don’t notice any real difference between them using roughly the same amount of pressure. I started a small portrait using the medium grade, and it handles nicely on this rag paper. Marks erase fairly easily, being charcoal.

A few more pencil sketches to show that I’ve drawn recently. I’m using my morgue file of random photo sources I’ve saved from various sources, as well as one study of the painting of “Aesop” by Diego Velazquez.