Here’s the latest version of the new oil painting. I need to do some minor clean up on edges, but it’s mostly finished.

I’ve done more work on the new painting. Here I’ve roughly set the values I want, and added some color. I’ve kept the application of paint very thin using a medium mixture of oil and casein.

Starting a new painting. This is a taken from a frame of an old video I took of some guys in a mosh pit slamming each other around. It’s on a stretched canvas that’s 18×24″. I first roughly laid down a grid with a light brown pastel pencil to help me transfer the image, and then drew in the outlines of shapes. I decided to use oils this time, blocking in the darker shades with a thin dark blue mixture. Once this dries, I’ll go over this whole canvas with a mid tone glaze to tone down the whites, and then start putting in some color. The plan now is to keep all the strokes of paint big and fast to keep that frenetic feeling of the dancing figures. We’ll see how that develops.

The city workers were back yesterday to finish up putting in a new water line across the street, so I made a couple sketches of them as they broke for lunch. One group was playing poker, and another guy on his phone. I thought it was cute how one of the poker players set his sunglasses on the back of his head.

I’m using a dual brush Tombow ink marker here that is a range of grays, but I seem to prefer just using the lightest grey shade. It has an almost pencil like mark to it.

I stopped by the local library yesterday, and pulled out some drawing paper to sketch out a few pages. The guy was sitting in courtyard outside, playing his electric guitar without an amp which was interesting. The woman was sitting at a desk inside in front of her laptop. My drawing pen was a light grey Tombow marker. It makes marks like other layout markers where it will bleed a dot if you start or end your stroke resting on the paper, which you can see on the drawing of the guy. On the woman I drew marks in a more sweeping stroke to avoid that look.

Here are a few photos I shot at last night’s art show in the Cultural Activities Center in Temple, TX where my painting was entered. It was a small show, but drew a decent crowd of some 30 to 40 people. I’ve entered this annual local show several times in the past, and this is the first time they’ve had it in this gallery space which is a large community center. It’s a building more suited to displaying artwork, and I like it much better. Also, they were kind enough to award my painting a 2nd place award. Our specific show was held in a small room as you enter the building, but I took a few more pictures of the other galleries that had different work up. I highly recommend checking the space out. They have music, theatre performances, dance events, and classes.

This is a quick sketch I made based on a photo I found online of a bust by Lawrence Bradshaw of W.E.B. Du Bois.

Pulled a photo from my magazine references of this Greek bust of the God Pan to make into a drawing. I recently bought a set of markers from the Tombow company that were a range of grayscale values, and wanted to test them out.

A city crew has been working on a water line out front of my house for several days, and today I made some sketches while they were on their lunch break. 8.5×11″ with an ink pen.

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.