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I wasn’t going to put this painting on my blog, but my cousin Terri encouraged me to.  It is a painting based on my vacation at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina earlier this year.  I didn’t feel like it wasn’t up to my quality.  It was accepted into a show recently when I submitted it as a fluke.

myrtle-beach1You will see I used atmospheric perspective.  The closer persons are painted larger, while those further away are smaller.  The closer ones are more clearly portrayed and those in the distance are less defined and the colors ared faded.

Maybe you will like it better than I thought.   Who knows?  If not, I’ll put something else up very soon.

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qaisars-momI love doing portraits.  I finished this one last night and delivered it this morning.  The subject is a woman who died two weeks ago.

You’ll see my technique — I first look for shapes of values or colors and draw them in.  Next I fill in the darkest values, then I do  the lightest ones.  Finally I fill in the medium values.  The shadows around her eyes, the area under her nose and bottom lip and chin are the darkest.  Note the area above her eyebrow, along her cheek and the edge of the nose.  This is where the lightest values are.  The rest of the face is medium.  This technique gives the face volume.  It doesn’t appear flat on the canvas.

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college-pieceThis painting is from my advanced figure painting class when I was a student at the University of Utah.  The model was in a low-light setting.  You will notice that only the essentials are portrayed — the eyes, nose and mouth.  She is basically silhouetted.  The eyes are in a shadow, so only the eyelid is shown.  Note the highlights on the eyelid, the nose and chin. The back wall is painted light, giving contrast to the figure.  The top part of her body is lighted, but the other is in shadow.  The shadow  is one dark shape.

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paddling-with-grandpaI’m paddling with my daughter and her two children.  My grandson, Jacob, is enthralled by the water.  He leans over to drag his hand through it.  My daughter, Sarah, grabs his pants to keep him from falling in.

Some might say this painting is too impressionistic.  I disagree.  To me, painting is like singing while photography is spoken.  This event was a musical moment and was expressed that way.

Note the mirror images below the canoe with lines going through them to give the impression of water.  The reflections of trees on the shore are expressed by streaks of yellow, green, blue and orange.  The sky is reflected in the bottom left corner.

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portrait-progression

On my blog of June 25th you see the beginning of a portrait from a demo in the class I teach.  In that one I taught the students to draw the face in, then the shapes of the values and colors.  I had them mix three values of skin color, dark, medium and light.  From there I had them paint in the values as they saw them on the model’s face.  You see the results in the picture on the left.

The painting on the right is from the next class when I took the portrait further.  I painted the iris of the eyes, the dark pupil, then a dot of white for a highlight.  That dot is what gives the painting life.  Next I worked on the color in the eyelids and lips.  At that point I brushed some hair color and red in the cheeks.

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ciao-feI’m fed up with trying to paint like others want me to.  I’m tired of the central Indiana art scene.  The only way to make it with them is to paint barns.  You have to use the same exact techniques.  You can’t tell the difference between one artist and the other.  Their paintings fill the local galleries and gather dust.  From now on, I’m going to paint what I feel like and how I feel like.  I don’t care if I ever get into another show or sell another painting.

This painting was done with pure emotion.  I just let the juices flow.  Look at it — she’s got feeling and presence.  Look at her eyes  — you know she’s thinking.  She’s surrounded by her work.

I entered this  in the state fair.  A  local type judge didn’t give it the time of day.  I thought that it was a failure.  Then someone told me congratulations.  I had won the Governor’s Choice Award.  They had come in after the original judge.  I got a huge ribbon.  The painting hung in the governor’s mansion.  At a reception there, the First Lady, Judy O’Bannon, told me how much she loved it.

So there.