Finished bedroom

Here is the final version of the bedroom painting. I decided to title it "3:45pm" which is the time shown on the clock, though it is too small to read at this image's size.

3:45pm

28"x36"

Drawings!

Lately I've been getting back into charcoal drawing and I'm really enjoying it. At first I was using it as part of the process of creating a painting, but the drawings had enough of their own energy to stand alone. I am experimenting a lot with my charcoal technique, but here are the first two drawings.

There are some drawing issues in the face, but it was a decent first attempt.

Progress and Looseness

I have been feeling the itch to loosen up for a couple of months. My work is not usually as tight as it has been, but I felt the need to push myself in a more realistic direction. I'm having a lot of fun now that I've loosened up and I feel like I should have been painting this way all along. The difficult thing I'm experiencing now is how to know when my paintings are done. I don't feel like either of these are finished yet, so I'll probably paint until I get sick of them and then call them finished.

 I had some more compositional issues with this piece. Here is the block-in before I was going to build the smaller canvas. At this stage I still wasn't happy with the composition so I made everything a little bigger.

Here is the result (with a bit of work added) but I am finally content with the composition. The previous iteration didn't have the impact or power I wanted to convey, but I found that making everything fill out the canvas more did the trick. It also meant that I didn't have to build another canvas, which is a win all the way around.

 I put this guy on the back-burner for a while. This is what it looks like 3 sittings after it's first post. I worked on it a couple of months ago when I was trying to get it ready for my solo show but (luckily) wasn't able to finish it. The painting at that stage - which I unfortunately didn't document - was really stiff and didn't have the energy that was so nice in the early stage of the piece, so yesterday I pulled it out again and got wild with it. Now I'm starting to have fun with it again.

New painting progress

I've been working diligently on the kitchen painting, but I think it is time to step back from it and work on something else. This is a painting I started back in September and put on the back-burner until now. It measures 28"x 35" and this is what it looks like after 4 or 5 sittings. The room was dark and my canvas was poorly lit, which explains some of its current value and color issues. I hope to remedy these things in the studio.