A Couple of Artworks

Here are two artworks that started in our weekly life drawing sessions.  In both, I got to a certain point, didn't like it, wiped it out, and started over.  Both wound up being muted and quiet, which in these cases is a pretty good quality, I think.

This was the first one, a portrait of Apryl.  I started it in charcoal and let the drawing tell me what it wanted.  From the very first, it wanted to be quiet.  I worked on getting the drawing right, but wasn't successful.  Well, it was kinda close, but not there, so I wiped it out and started over on the same sheet.  This time, I saw some of what was wrong and corrected it.  Then I began working with the pastels.  Here's where the drawing's demands for quiet really showed up.  It didn't want strong reds and yellows in the skin tones, and didn't want strong reddish-browns in the hair.  So I kept the colors barely there.  At the end of the night, it looked pretty good, but the likeness still wasn't quite right.  I took a couple of reference photos and, a few days later (with a fresh viewpoint), I reworked it.  It really didn't take much: the face was very slightly too long and her mouth was a bit too far down.  Two hours of work and this was done.  

This drawing of Emma was started in our most recent life drawing session.  It was another artwork that told me from the get-go that it wanted to be quiet.  I blocked in the figure in charcoal, then developed it to a higher level than what you see now.  It was still relatively un-developed, though - nothing was brought up to what most people consider "finished" except maybe in the face.  Then I brought in the pastels and messed it up.  The colors were too harsh.  So, one hour into a two-hour session, I wiped it out.  This left a lot of marks on the paper that I thought were interesting.  I re-developed only a few areas of the drawing in charcoal, primarily the face and shoulder.  Then I brought in the pastels, only with a very light touch, and gave her some skin tones in the head shoulders, and parts of her arms.  A couple of days later, I did some alterations: scrubbing some areas down, bringing the shapes and darks and colors up in other areas, and adding a touch of color in the background to help set her off.  Sounds simple, but it took all afternoon before it felt like it was really done.

I'm really liking the effect of the muted colors and "incomplete" drawings.  There's less specifics here, which means that you, the viewer, have to bring more of your own ideas to the artwork.  Less "telling" on my part, more "suggesting".  There's a tension between the developed and undeveloped areas that I like.  I might be on to something here.  Or not - check back in a few months!

Sema's Shadow

 "Sema's Shadow" is a new figurative artwork that I recently finished.  It's in charcoal and pastel on toned paper, size 25"x19".  I thought I'd share a bit of background on how it developed.

This started as a drawing from one of our life sessions. It was an okay drawing but that's about it. Not much life to it and it was a standard life drawing pose. I wanted to see if I could take it up a few notches, giving it character and more interest. So I began drawing over it, covering things, erasing things, but keeping the same basic pose. I wanted it to be more evocative and less descriptive. After working on it intermittently for several weeks, in between other works, here's how it turned out:

So what do you think? Is it better? Worse? Neither, just different?


#figurativeart #figuredrawing #artistmodel #lifedrawing #charcoaldrawing #pastelfiguredrawing #contemporaryfigurativeart #ashevilleartist #ashevilleart #skiprohde

Year In Review

About this time of the year, people often take a look back over the past year.  Well, okay, normal people do it sometime in December.  I'm lazy and held off until early January.  But hey, better late than never, right?

A few statistics.  Over the past 12 months, I've done 23 oil paintings that survived to get a title.  There were probably half as many again that got wiped out or otherwise destroyed.  Of the survivors, 8 were commissioned wedding paintings.  That's a good number for me, I think.  Any more and making the wedding paintings would be too much like a real job.  As it is, they're still a lot of fun and a great creative challenge.  Of the other paintings, ten were oil on panel figure and portrait studies, done during our weekly life sessions, most with some touchup work over the next day or two.  Another painting was a revision to a portrait from a few years ago - it was enough of a revision that I considered it a new work.  The remaining four paintings were total creations: "Reflection" is a psych study of a young woman, "The Conversation" is two people not having one, "Siren on the Styx" was a total invention from my subconscious (I think, but damned if I know for sure), and "Moving On" was my last painting of the year.

Oil painting wasn't my only medium.  I did 31 charcoal and pastel works on paper that survived to get titled, and maybe half again that number that went into the garbage.  All were figurative works.  I started the year doing two portraits for a couple who really deserved them.  I also did several portrait and figure works based on photo sessions with the lovely Natalie and Jazmin, both of whom are great models with a real talent for projecting their personality.  When I'm working from photos, I don't just copy the image, I try to find something that goes beyond what the camera saw.  In one case, finding that "something" required using Natalie's head from one image, arms from a second, and body from a third! 

Two more of my charcoal and pastel pieces were commissioned portraits.  Almost all the rest were studies that I began in our regular life sessions and then completed later.  At one point during the year, I did a big cleanup in the studio and found a bunch of old charcoal drawings from my life sessions between 2004 and 2010.  Some of those were fairly decent (maybe that says that I haven't learned anything since then?) and I thought I'd touch them up with pastels.  Most of those turned out well while some went in the trash. 

I also got to work with the WLOS TV news crews this year for another courtroom session.  Those are always interesting and fun.  Cameras are not allowed in federal courthouses, so news outlets will use artists to capture something of the proceedings.  This year, it was the sentencing of several county employees convicted of corruption.  I've written about the experience before.  Courtroom proceedings can be enjoyable as long as you're not one of the participants in the proceedings!

So that was a pretty good year.  For this year, I'm hoping to do about the same number of wedding paintings.  I want to see if I can do something more with the charcoal and pastel works (not sure what "more" means yet), and I want to develop a series of oil paintings along the lines of the last one completed.  It's ambitious, but if you're not striving for something, then what are you doing?

Revisions

During my recent effort to inventory my artworks, I rediscovered a bunch of old charcoal drawings.  They had been stacked up years ago and left to get moved, smudged, and eventually ruined.  Some of them, I immediately tore up and threw away.  But some others weren't too bad.  I wondered if they could be reworked with pastel into "keepers".  So I gave it a shot.

And learned something interesting.  My way of working in charcoal and pastel lately has been to do a rough sketch in charcoal and then do most of the development with pastel.  It's an impatient method that assumes the black-and-white structure of the drawing is solid.  If it is, great.  If not, then making necessary changes is very difficult.  A lot of my works have gone into the trash because the architecture of the drawing and the accuracy of the likenesses weren't strong.  Adding color on top of that just gilded a pig.

By contrast, these old figure drawings were already fully-formed.  They're all done with vine charcoal with white highlights on toned Canson paper.  Vine charcoal is very easy to work with: it lays down a gray line or area and is very easy to erase and correct.  I had already worked out the composition, structure, and likenesses with all these drawings and they were good enough at one time for me to keep them.  So all they needed was some pastel to bring out the color.

Almost all of them came out well.  One was totally unsuccessful and is now in the trash can, but four look pretty good.  Here they are:

I took the lessons learned from this approach and applied them at our weekly life session last night.  Rather than dive into the pastel at an early stage, I worked for most of the session on the charcoal drawing, then only used the pastel during the last 45 minutes or so.  It looked pretty good when I left the studio last night.  Now I need to see it with fresh eyes before deciding whether it's a keeper or not.

More New Works

I've been fairly productive in the studio this month.  I've been able to do quite a few charcoal and pastel works, both from life and from a photo session with Natalie.  I've also done a couple of oil paintings, started work on an experimental oil painting, had a photo session with another model, and this afternoon had a photo session for a commissioned portrait.  That's a lotta studio activity!

I'm not going to snow you under with a whole bunch of artworks all at once.  So to start with, here are five charcoal and pastel works of Natalie.  She's a wonderful model - a tiny young woman, beautiful, fairly reserved, but with a wild child buried inside.  She has worked with my Wednesday night life group quite a few times.  I've found life sessions to be invaluable - a critical exercise for anybody who calls themselves a figurative artist.  But one thing that life sessions can't do, at least not in a single 2-hour session, is probe much below the surface.  The model gets in a position and then holds it.  All facial expression goes away.  Don't believe me?  Try to hold a smile or frown or whatever for more than a few seconds.  It doesn't work.  Besides that, if you try, it comes across as false.

That's where photo sessions can be valuable.  Photos can capture momentary facial expressions or body positions that can't be held for more than a fraction of a second.  That's where a lot of personality is really revealed.  So, to try to capture some of Natalie's spirit, we did a photo session in the studio late last fall.  Here are several artworks resulting from that session as well as one Wednesday night life session.

Natalie #4

 I love the hand positions in this one.  She was just turning around, not even trying to pose, and there was some of her natural elegance.  In the artwork, I played up the elegance and simplified a few things to keep the focus on the pose and hands.

Natalie #5

 The reference photo had a good bit to recommend it: an interesting composition between her torso and arm, and the heavy shadows, particularly covering her eyes, gave her a mysterious air.  So that's what I worked with.  The charcoal and pastel dust trickled down the paper and I decided to leave it.  Hey, this is an artwork, not a photo!

Natalie #6

 Natalie is a lively young lady and I wanted to try to capture that aspect of her as well.  Smiles and laughter can be very hard.  That was certainly true here: getting the right balance of likeness and spirit kicked my butt.  But I think it got there.

 Natalie #7

This was another butt-kicker.  For one, it was done on black Canson paper.  This was the first time I'd used a black, and it required some different thinking.  All my other works have been on Canson papers with a mid-value tone.  With those, I could go both lighter and darker.  With black paper, you can only go lighter.  And black paper has NO depth.  I quickly learned that it required a pastel treatment over the whole surface to give it any kind of life at all.  And the pose turned out to be a problem.  In the original reference, she was sitting on a stool, but that didn't look right, so I wiped it out and decided to have her standing.  The upper torso, shoulders, and upper arms worked okay, but the first attempt at a face failed.  So I decapitated the poor girl (NOT REALLY) and replaced it with a head from another image.  And the hands came from a different photo session with another model entirely.  But in the end, it works.

Natalie #8

This one didn't come from the photo session, it was done during our Wednesday night life session a few weeks ago.  This pose was a challenge: visually, she's upside down and foreshortened.  And the light was coming from over my left shoulder, so there was almost nothing in the way of shadow to help give depth.  All of which made this one kinda fun.  I did 90% of it that night, then worked on her face and arms the next day.

Not everything is a winner, though.  There was one image of Natalie that I worked on, off and on, for weeks.  It finally went into the trash.  Sometimes you just gotta recognize when a composition isn't going to work and move on.

There are quite a few other artworks that I've done and would like to talk about, but will save that for the next post.  Oh, and all of these are available, if you'd like to have one for your own collection.  Just sayin' ...  

New Artworks

With the end of the wedding season and a quiet period in my day-job business, I've been able to spend some more time in the studio lately.  I've been working primarily with the charcoal and pastel series and thought I'd share some, with their stories, here.

James 

Rachel

I met James and Rachel late last fall.  Without getting into specifics, James has had some experiences that few of us have ever had and none of us ever want.  He's a very intense man who feels deeply and expresses himself honestly.  Rachel is his wife.  She is his rock.  She's a beautiful woman through and through and, from my experience, very upbeat, outgoing, and positive.  They are two halves of one being.  Soon after meeting them, I knew I had to do their portraits.  Both came out, I think, pretty well, and will be on their way to James and Rachel very soon.

Every now and then I'll bring one of my models into the studio for a photo session.  We'll go for about an hour and take a ton of pictures.  These sessions are really about getting the models to show parts of their personalities that don't come out in a crowded life session.  I don't direct, no "do this, do that" - instead, it's about encouraging them to be themselves.  Last fall, I did such a session with Natalie, one of our regular models.  She's a lovely young woman with alabaster skin tones that are so hard to get right, and a reserved manner that hides a bit of a vamp.  Over the past week or so, I've done three of her:

Natalie #3 

 Natalie #4

Natalie #5

These were a lot of fun to do.  My goal was to capture some of the playfulness that sometimes bubbles out, while keeping the mystery that's hiding behind her reserved demeanor.  There was one other artwork of her, one that began in a life session but never hit the "keeper" criteria.  I tried reworking it and it failed.  So it's destroyed.  But these turned out well, especially, to my mind, #5.

I've got another project going in the studio as well, a painting.  I'll cover that one in another post.

Apryl #3

Apryl #3

Charcoal and pastel on toned paper

Here's my newest piece in the charcoal and pastel series that I've been doing for a couple of years now.  I'm pretty happy with it.  Apryl is a very lively young woman, very animated and a great life model.  I've done two previous artworks of her.  Both times, she took interesting poses and held them like a rock.  That's great for figure studies, but there's one drawback.  No model can hold a true facial expression for more than a moment, no matter how good they are.

Want to test it?  Great!  Get a mirror and give yourself a big smile.  No, no, a REAL smile, one that you mean.  Nope, try again.  Okay, getting better.  Got it yet?  Okay, now hold that for 20 minutes.  Don't move, now!

Yeah, right.  Many people don't even like to smile for the camera, and that's just for a second or two.

The issue with facial expressions is that they are reflections of our inner state of mind, which is constantly changing.  When you're posing for an artist, you can hold your body in a position for quite a while, but your mind is going off somewhere else.  As one guy who sat for the painter Lucien Freud said, posing is a cross between zen meditation and a trip to the barber.  I've found that models' faces will settle in to a neutral or blank expression, one that will naturally hold itself over a long period of time.  Sometimes you can see flickers of expression cross their faces as some train of thought is amusing, frustrating, or whatever, but mostly it's just blank.

So how do I do expressions?  Photography.  I'll have a camera out as I talk with the model and will shoot a lot of photos.  Then I'll use the photos as references to build the artwork.  I don't copy the photo, though, but will use the images to see the details of how somebody's face shows expression.

This image came from my last life session with Apryl.  Her expression during the pose was, as all are, pretty blank.  But she's certainly not blank, she's smart, funny, and very expressive.  So during a break, I got out my camera and took a bunch of photos as we talked.  Then we went back to the pose. Now, several weeks later, I was able to go back, look at the photos, and start something new based on them.

Originally, this was a full-figure image of her sitting cross-legged.  I had a rough block-in and decided that it wasn't good enough.  For me, the attraction was in her face, and the small paper didn't allow a full-figure with sufficient room to develop her face.  So I rubbed out the figure, although you can still see a few traces of it.  I started over, looking at just the head and upper body.  The first stage was a rough block-in with vine charcoal.  Then I wiped down most of the vine and hit it with willow charcoal.  Why wipe down the vine?  It seems to fill the pores in the paper with slick particles and the heavier charcoals and pastels don't want to stick.  So I wipe a lot of the vine off, leaving enough to guide me along.

My next stage with Apryl was to use the willow charcoal to develop the features.  But I developed the features too much: there was so much detail in the face that the image lost some of the magic.  I got frustrated and hit it with a kneaded eraser.  That took a lot of over-development out and what was left was streaky.  But the streakiness was cool, so I re-developed the face, but only lightly and not nearly with as much detail.  Then came a light application of pastels to add color, first to the lighted areas, and later to some (not all) of the shadows.  Usually, I focus on the eyes, but this time, I focused on her smile, which was the important element in her expression.  There was a lot of experimentation, lots of rub-outs and erasures, and some happy accidents.  Finally, there was the image.

So, yes, I'm very happy with this one. 

Revisions

Artists, do you ever go back and revise an earlier artwork?  I will, on occasion.  I just did it today, which is what brings it to mind.  Sometimes it results in a better work.  More often, though, the revision totally fails and it winds up in the trash can.  Today, I think it worked.

One of my charcoal and pastel figure drawings was bugging me.  We had Amy model for one of our Wednesday night life sessions back in December, and my scribbles that night seemed to be kinda/sorta working.  The next day, I did some touchup and called it complete.  It's been tacked to the studio wall since then, alongside other works that I liked.

Except it kept bugging me.  Here's how it looked:

The shoulders were too square, the torso too long, and the color pretty weak, and I didn't like the way the color faded out.  But I had other things on my plate and they took priority.

So, today, I had time to work on it.  A couple of years ago, Amy and I did a photo shoot in the studio. I found a couple of photos from that session that could, with some changes, be used as references to possibly fix this work.  Or ruin it altogether.  Either way, I considered it to be substandard, so it needed to change or be tossed.  I worked on it a couple of hours and here's how it looks now:

This revision works much better.  The shoulders feel more natural, the color is richer, the torso is shorter, and it just feels stronger all the way around.  I'm much happier with it.  What do you think?

Leslie Saeta's 30 in 30 Challenge

I recently signed up for Leslie Saeta's 30 in 30 challenge.  Leslie is a California-based artist who runs the Artists Helping Artists podcast, a really great resource at any stage of your career.  They talk about marketing, interview artists, and discuss a wide range of topics dealing with being a professional-level artist.  Leslie started a "30 in 30" challenge a few years ago with the goal of getting people into the studio, making work, experimenting, and sharing.  The goal is to make 30 artworks in 30 days.  They don't have to be big, nor fully realized, nor much of anything else - even if it's 30 quick oil sketches, they're good.  I'd heard about the challenge in years past but not participated.  This year, I decided to jump in.

So here's my first entry into the Challenge: "Mary Lou" charcoal and pastel on Canson toned paper, 25"x19".  This was done in a 2-hour life session.  Actually, the first hour saw me wipe out three or four false starts.  I'd get going, but it wouldn't feel right, or it would look like crap (or both), and I'd wipe it out and start over.  Things finally started happening during the last hour.  And here it is.  I even signed it!

Latest Artworks

I haven't posted any new artwork on here in quite a while, have I?  Okay, time to play catch-up.  I've been working on several different things.

I've got a new wedding painting on my easel right now that I'm close to finishing up.  No, it's not ready for prime time yet, so you can't see it, but at least you know it's there and it has been sucking up a good bit of studio time lately.

I've also got a double-portrait commission pretty much done.  The one who commissioned it is going to come to the studio soon to give it the thumbs-up or thumbs-down.  Once I get a thumbs-up, you'll see it here.  Again, it's something that has been taking up a good bit of studio time.

I've done several more new pieces in my charcoal and pastel series.  Several focus on Astrid, a lovely young lady:

 Astrid #1

 Astrid #2

 Astrid #3

 Astrid #4

 Astrid #5

Astrid #6

I see some of these as more successful than others.  My favorites are #1 and #4.  I'd like to hear what you think - leave a note a tell me!

We had a young man sit for our Wednesday night group a couple of weeks ago as a portrait model.  Nicholas has very distinctive features and was an excellent model, as well as being a really fascinating subject of study.  Here's how his portrait turned out:

Nicholas

The next week, we had a new model, Jazmin.  I was pretty happy with her head and face at the end of the session, but didn't like the way everything below her neck turned out.  So the next day, I wiped out the body and reworked it entirely.  This second try turned out much better:

Jazmin

So there you have it: most of my artworks over the past many weeks.  There were a bunch of other attempts in addition to these, but they were failures and consigned to the trash bin.  My failure rate seems to hover around 50% - that is, half of the things I start wind up looking pretty bad, at least to my eyes.  Of the ones that are not failures, maybe half are okay, some are not bad, and a very few are pretty good.  Many years ago, one art student told me that he never had failures.  I told him he wasn't trying hard enough!

New Works

I've continued to work on figurative works using charcoal and pastel over the past few weeks.  My spousal unit wanted a portrait done in that style.  That was a surprise to me.  She has refused to sit for me for quite a few years now because she says I make her look "old", and she gets bored after sitting still for more than 33 seconds.  So I had her come to the studio and we spent an hour shooting a bunch of photographs that I could then use for a portrait.

Doing the first portrait took quite a while.  There was a little pressure there ... okay, a LOT of pressure, knowing that if anything didn't quite measure up to her satisfaction, I'd hear about it for as long as the artwork existed.  And I wanted to get it right, anyway.  I started one, got pretty far along, and wiped it all out.  Then I started another on the same paper, got pretty far along, and wiped it out, too.  Then a third time.  Finally, on the fourth try, things started coming together.  Oddly enough, it owed a lot of its success to the three failures that had left their mark on the paper.  Here's how it turned out:

This one is definitely Janis.  I think I got her strength along with a really good likeness.  Yeah, I'm happy with it.

The three failures contributed to this by leaving something of their marks on the paper.  You can see that on the left and right sides, where there are dark areas with lighter streaks.  They hinted that I should leave those areas soft and roughly done.  I focused the color on her face and hair, with the highest value contrasts and sharpest edges right around her eyes and nose.  That kept the viewer's attention, while further away, the blacks transitioned to grays, sharp lines went soft, and those areas played a supporting role to the face.

Most importantly, she likes it and it's at the frame shop as I write.

I did another portrait of her after that.  This time, I based it on a very different photo, one of her laughing.  It was also difficult, but for different reasons. than the first  Laughing is something that is very hard to capture in an artwork.  Faces deform: the eyes scrunch up, mouths stretch, folds appear where normally there are no folds, muscles in the neck pop out, and the whole face basically goes out of whack.  It's hard enough to get a good likeness when they're normal - getting a good likeness when it's a dynamic situation and everything has changed is harder, and then making the figure look alive on top of that is really tough.  But I think it came out well.  I really like this portrait of her.

She hates it.

Oh, well.  One out of two isn't bad at all.  But for the sake of harmony at home, that image will not be shown.  Sorry!

Working from Life

I run a life drawing session in my studio every week.  This is a chance to get with a bunch of other artists, share a model's expenses, and try to learn something new about working from life.  It's a lot of fun.  It's also a challenge.  I try to push myself every week so that I'm not in a rut.  I'll work in oil for a couple of weeks, then switch to charcoal and pastel.  Sometimes I'll focus on a portrait, other times I'll see if I can get the whole figure in.  I don't post all that many of the works anywhere since about half of them wind up being destroyed or painted over.  But sometimes, things click pretty well and I'm happy with what's finally on the paper or canvas.

Last week, we had a lovely young lady working with us.  She is into yoga big-time and has very well-defined muscles.  No, she's not a bodybuilder by any means - just somebody who's muscle and bone structure are very much in harmony.  We started the session with our usual 1-minute poses.  We do this to warm up both the model and the artists and to find a pose that works for both.  One of the poses highlighted the curve and muscles of her back in a striking way.  So that was the pose I chose for the rest of the evening, and here's how it came out:

If this looks like it was an uncomfortable pose to hold, it was.  The poor girl's knees and legs took a beating and we had to take several extra breaks so she could get her circulation back!

I started this with soft vine charcoal on Canson Mi-Teintes light yellow paper.  The charcoal is easily manipulated and lets me block things in, smudge things to get an area of gray, and even erase it easily.  My focus was on her shoulders, upper back, and along the spine.  Once I had a good drawing in place, I hit some areas with compressed charcoal.  This stuff is very black and doesn't lift, so when you put it down, it stays.  The last stage was the pastel.  I kept the colors soft and subtle.  There were lots of interesting colors all over due to the lighting.  My overhead lights are daylight-balanced, so they're a bit blue, while the spotlight is a tungsten bulb and so it's a warm yellow.  Normally, our eyes automatically adjust for color and we usually don't see the effects of different colored lighting, but in the studio, it's very noticeable.  With this figure, the warm light was mostly on her shoulders and upper back, while her hips and legs were picking up a lot of the blue lighting.

So I think it turned out pretty well, particularly for a drawing from life.  I love it when that happens!