Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Mannequin Skin

Here are some progress shots of last month's figure painting. Our model had an accident a couple years ago...she was run over by a train and lost both her legs. She's only 19 but has a great attitude and now competes as a skiier in the Paralympics.

I began the painting below at the beginning of September and I feel like I've learned so much about flesh tones since then! As you can see, I was using a lot of orange but Jeff showed me that there was a lot more color in her skin than I realized. He painted a small figure on my canvas to the left of mine and made her back much cooler by adding yellow and green...what? I did not see that.  I felt a little discouraged as Jeff was pointing out some crazy colors but in the last month, with Jeff's help,  I've started to recognize the color that I didn't see before. Hooray!


(by the way, I know these paintings are really ugly and I kind of hate looking at them, but I'm posting them to show what I've learned)


Jeff encouraged me to be more bold with color and to exaggerate a bit at first because I can always tone the colors down when needed. To help me practice being bold I decided to do some small studies. The paintings below are about 5x7" while the one above was closer to 16x20."

Notice how the orange figures don't look as real. They seem like mannequins. When you add more color they start to come to life.

I did the figure on the left, from the same view as above, and made the back really green.  Then I tried another view from the front.
This is the same front view as above, but more finished. The chest was much cooler than the rest of the body. I exaggerated that a bit and made it quite blue. Jeff said it was too cool and didn't feel cohesive with the rest of the figure, but he liked the sliver of green on the back and the yellow on the abs. He told me to leave it as is and try again.


This is attempt 2. Jeff said the chest was more successful, but some of the first painting was better than this version.

This is the same painting as above to compare with the edits Jeff made on the painting below.
 Jeff added some yellow to the shadows on the torso to warm them up a little.  He taught me that often when there's a figure whose flesh feels pasty it's because the shadows are too cool.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

In the open air

Yesterday a few of us from the Hein Academy decided to take advantage of the beautiful fall weather and go plein air painting up Little Cottonwood Canyon! I have never really done plein air painting so it was a lot of fun just to have the experience. We were hoping to get some fall colors but we missed it by about a week. We were surprised to see snow and it was neat to paint a winter scene without freezing. It was a bit nippy because of a cold breeze, but the sun was shining and it was glorious!

I did the painting on the right first (see below), but it was not going well so I started over with a different view (on the left). It felt really different from the portraits and still lifes that I'm used to. It was a bit liberating because you don't have to be precise and it still works. It was fun!

While we were painting some photographers from Florida came over and asked to take our picture. They might email us some of the pics they took, which I'm sure are much better than mine. If so I'll be sure to post them.


(sorry for the glare)

 
plein air painting with the crew up Little Cottonwood Canyon