Day 14 of Night Man

The fourth oil pastel landscape was a bust. It got to a point where I just couldn't do anything to it to fix the craftmanship mistakes I made, so I decided to proceed onwards and back to the oil paintings.

Today marked the 14th day of work on Night Man and I used it primarily as a day to get back into the swing of things. I worked mostly on the upper torso but also moved the "Happy Trail" over about a half an inch to better align it with the rest of the body.

Day 13 of Night Man

Today, I pretty much continued my effort to complete the lower torso of Night Man, and after much difficulty with the pubic hair, I believe I'm pretty much there. I'm gonna be up in Montgomery for the weekend, and once I return I hope to begin working on the upper body and head with much more fervor, and try to just let the lower half be for now (although I expect I'm gonna be brought back down there eventually...).

Day 12 of Night Man

Yesterday, I continued my work on the lower torso of Night Man and kinda started to redefine the staff. I also did a little work on both arms and the slightest amount of work on the face. In addition to renaming Nude With Staff as Night Man, I also decided to rename Greek Self-Portrait as Day Man. For some, the name reference may be quite evident, but for the rest, I'll go ahead and state that the names were inspired by the show "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," and the renaming of both paintings has allowed me to develop a backstory and meaning behind each. For those too lazy to develop their own stories and meanings, feel free to comment and request my input.

Day 11 of Night Man

Last night I decided to give Nude With Staff the less straight-forward name of "Night Man." Today I spent most of my time working on the skin tones of the lower torso and am very close to calling it complete for that section and will begin to really focus on the upper body in the next few days.

Day 10 of Nude With Staff

After a rather long haitus from painting, I got back in the saddle and worked a little on Nude With Staff today. I wanted to ease back into things so I worked primarily on giving the left arm a little more substance and kinda did the same for the right arm. I also worked on the overall skin tone throughout the figure, but tried not to focus on many details.

Day 9 of Nude With Staff

Another day of working on Nude With Staff. I started with working on the upper torso and neck and made my way down. I also worked a little on the upper left arm. Although much of it is shadow or censored, the lower torso is almost complete form and shadow-wise, except the legs need some glazing to appear less pasty. The figure as a whole still needs alot of work color-wise since it currently looks like a jaundice patient.

I've allowed more of my own style and brushwork to show through on this painting than with Old McDonald. Instead of my method of focusing on a quadrant or element like i did with Old McDonald, I've been trying to work more of the canvas as a whole. I think this is mostly attributed to the massive size difference, but it does seem to help maintain consistency. I'm gonna try and work on the arms mostly tomorrow so the entire figure can be at the same relative state of completeness. That way it will be easier to keep skin tones consistent when putting in all the details and those last light glazes at the end.

Day 8 of Nude With Staff

Now that all the oil paintings I'm working on have reached the same relative state of completeness, it's getting harder for me to focus while working on a single one. Instead of trying to juggle them all from here on out, I'm gonna try to focus on an individual painting until its completion and I'm starting with Nude With Staff because it'll be easiest to render, technically speaking.

The first thing I did today was to paint in another transparent layer of my shadow color over the backgrond. Then, I spent most of my time painting "below the belt," but also did a little work on the upper torso and arms.

Project-a-Sketch: Male 2

I spent yesterday doing some more projector paintings. I started with another one based on an old charcoal figure drawing, which was actually the first image I attempted on Friday but initially screwed up. This redo turned out quite nice though. Out of the four of these I've done so far, I think this one is my favorite and there's something about using this method for figure painting that really works for me.

Project-a-Sketch: Male 1

Yesterday, after my experience with Agent Wyn A'taj's head I began to feel the drag of juggling four paintings at once and the tedious nature of oil painting in general. I felt I needed some instant art gratification, so I decided to try a new method of painting using my projector to give myself a break. Instead of using the projector to just establish the base of my paintings, I wanted to find a way to use it to make final products that could stand on their own. The first of these attempts was a failure, mainly because I tried to overwork it when I should have left it as it was about half-way through my work. Using that lesson I completed a second painting and am quite pleased with the results. Basically, I start with standard drawing paper that I've put a layer of gesso on each side. Then on one side I created a dark base by combining acrylic Red and Green. I then used the projector to portray the image (for this one I used a charcoal figure drawing of mine) on the canvas and used acrylic White to paint what needed to be painted and let what should be shadows go untouched.

Day 7 of Nude With Staff

Since my last post on Wednesday, I worked on the head of Agent Wyn A'taj on Thursday, but felt what I did actually was a step backwards from what I already had. So, on Friday I used my projector to correctly reestablish the facial features and get the painting back to where it was for its last post. Afterwards, I worked more on the head of Nude With Staff and a little more on it's torso.

Day 6 of Greek Self-Portrait

I spent most of my day working on Greek Self-Portrait, focusing on the flesh of the torso and head and a little on the arms.

Day 6 of Nude With Staff

After Stage 5, my process moves passed the basic layers and I begin to focus on specific areas, therefore I now refer to my work by Day and not Stage. Unlike the specific Stages, it's very difficult to describe exactly what I did each Day, so I'll just state what areas were worked on.

Today for Nude With Staff, I mainly focused on the head but also did a little work throughout the lower half of the body and just barely worked on the entire torso's shadows.

Stage 5 of Greek Self-Portrait

Yesterday, I did a little work on Greek Self-Portrait for Stage 5. I basically redid everything from from Stage 4, but paid a little more attention to establishing the exact outlines of the forms and making the solid elements more opaque.

Stage 5 of Nude With Staff

I completed Stage 5 of Nude With Staff today, although all I really did was put another transparent layer of the shadow mix in the background and another layer of flesh on the body. I also put some more Titanium White on the staff. My main goal today was to better establish the true form and boundaries of the figure and that's pretty much all I did.

Stage 4 of Greek Self-Portrait

I was supposed to go up to Alabama today to help a friend move but that plan got bumped to next weekend. Since I was staying home, I chose to do some housework and work a little on Greek Self-Portrait. The goal for today's painting was to just block in main color areas and to make sure there was pigment on just about every canvas pixel. To begin, I first made an orange comprised of one and one-half parts Cadmium Yellow Hue with one part Cadmium Red Hue. I then mix about one part of that orange with about two parts Ultramarine Blue to make a shadow mix. That shadow mix was then applied in a transparent layer over the background and shadows. For the skin tones I used the same mix that I used for the Stage 4 of Nude With Staff. I decided to honor the color scheme of a favorite character of mine by making the upper cloth Ultramarine Blue and the lower portion "Goku" orange. Once I had enough paint on the canvas I blended it all together and called it a day.

Stage 4 of Nude With Staff

Today I put a transparent layer of a shadow color mix comprised of one part Viridian Hue, one part Payne's Gray, and one part Alizarin Crimson in the background and shadows of the figure. I then painted in a base skin tone layer comprised of three parts Titanium White, one part Yellow Orche, and one-half part Cadmium Red over the figure. I blended the skin tones and shadows together in an effort the get most of the canvas completely covered with pigment. Finally, I used Titanium White to block in the staff.

Stage 3 of Greek Self-Portrait & Nude with Staff

In addition to working on and filming Stage 2 of MC Beat-MO Bo, I also completed Stage 3 for both Greek Self-Portrait and Nude with Staff today. For both these paintings, Stage 3 utilized a transparent layer of Viridian Hue in the shadow areas.

Stage 2 of Greek Self Portrait & Nude with Staff

I worked a little more on moving things this morning and hopefully soon I'll be able to start devoting full days to painting. Today for my painting time I added a transparent layer of Alizarin Crimson to both Greek Self-Portrait and Nude with Staff .

Stage 1 of Nude with Staff: Projection

In addition to my Greek Self-Portrait, I also started another painting simply titled Nude with Staff. As the name implies this painting contains nudity, but since I want to keep my blog family friendly, I'll be censoring these in-progress images. Like always for this stage, I employed my standard process of projection using a black and white image and Ultramarine Blue acrylic paint.

Stage 1 of Greek Self-Portrait: Projection

All the time I spent on moving and cleaning took away from all the time I should have spent working on Agent Wyn A'taj in order to have it ready for the juried show next week. Add to this the holiday this week and my plan to visit Montgomery this weekend and the ability to have Agent Wyn A'taj completed in time becomes even more non-existant. So, I decided not to worry about getting it done (I have plenty of other works I can submit) and moved onto creating some figure and cloth study paintings that I can alternate between as I work. The first one of these is what I'm refering to as a Greek Self-Portrait. For this stage one I utilized my typical method of using a black and white print-out to project from and Ultramarine Blue acrylic paint to establish my forms.