Great Dane Portrait

My son has a Harlequin Great Dane named Khloe who is nine years old and I painted this piece from a photo he sent me that was taken when she was five. She's a sweet, gentle dog with a queenly air. When she walks into a room or anywhere, for that matter, people notice her.

Khloe 11" x 14"
oil on canvas

Trying Other Methods

For the most part I'm an alla prima painter. I like to work wet in wet and finish quickly, blending as I go. I had some time on my hands recently and decided to try an older method where an underpainting is applied using a greenish tone and lead white is mixed with the green to paint the lights and halftones. It's important to identify the darks early and try to maintain them. I suppose you can use a drying agent like Liquin to speed up the process but I didn't.

I ended up painting some of the warm colors into the lead white mixture when it was wet, which is  not what I was supposed to do. If I try it again I'll use a drying solvent.

Here are a few progress images and the final, which I was pretty happy with. Why did I attempt this? Because I visited a museum a couple weeks ago and noticed that all the paintings I really liked had the red-green complimentary color scheme going on, and the green was very visible in the shadows.

I used a photo for my painting but this method was used extensively in the 16th and 17th centuries from life. Yeah- they didn't have camera back then. :)

Sgt. Jon Martin

Sgt. Jon L. Martin

I was asked to create this painting of Staff Sgt. Jon L. Martin five days before the event where it was to be presented. I have painted these posthumous pieces of military personnel who have been killed for the past eight years but someone else was asked to do the work this year. Martin died from injuries he received when he was injured in a bombing in Iraq.

Apparently the piece did not look like him and they asked me if I could do something at the last minute. The reference was awful- a tiny cell phone print out on plain computer paper.

So I finished three days before the event and ended up framing it for them two days prior to the ceremony.

It was a challenging piece, to say the least, but I was happy with the way it turned out.

I Didn't Stop Painting

A few people have asked me when I'm going to start updating my blog again, and the answer is today. I recently began working full time and it's limited my painting time. But I'm still painting and I'll share some of the good ones over the next few weeks.

This is a painting of Jessica, a model who posed for our portrait group in September. Jessica always manages to look like a different person every time she poses.

16" x 20" oil on canvas

Tegan

This young lady modeled for our portrait group last week. She was so professional and we appreciated her steady gaze, excellent posture and ability to return to the pose--and her beautiful costume, of course!

Hope with Red Hair

A portrait that I started at our weekly model group and finished at home. Thirteen year old Hope actually had pink hair but I did't feel like painting it that unnatural color. So I changed it to auburn. I asked her what color it really was before I left and she told me it was blonde. But I like the red I created and it's a natural foil for the olive shadow tones that always tend to show up in our room.

I worked on some watercolor paper that I gessoed and coated with a wash of black and yellow ochre a few years ago. I found it when I was cleaning up my studio and I thought it would be fun to try something different. I really liked the way the paint went on. It's very different from the new Arches oil paper, which is a bit flimsy. I did a portrait on that paper and it actually tore when I removed the tape from the board it was mounted on.

Hope 11" x 14" oil on paper

The Matriarch of the Family

I urge people to take many photos of their loved ones. Good photos are essential if you want to commission a posthumous portrait. This applies to dogs as well as humans. I've had to turn many people down because they didn't have a decent reference. Photos taken out side in the shade are the absolute best.

Sometimes I'll try a flash photo if the subject is especially interesting and that's how I came to paint Molly's grandmother, the matriarch of their family. The reference looked like it was taken in a dark reception hall but the contours of the subject's face were pretty clear so I thought I might be able to pull it off. I was pleased with the way the portrait came together.

The Matriarch 11" x 14" 

Oil on linen

Rango- an Aussie mix

Rango - 11" x 14" oil on linen

An unusual view for a dog portrait but I loved the expression in the reference photo provided by the client. He is a rescue dog- an Aussie mix and very intelligent.

Prize Winner

You never know what a juror will pick. That's for sure. A painting that I entered in a portrait show only because I knew my friend would be attending, won the top prize in the show. It's a painting of her, viewing a painting at Art Prize in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I couldn't attend the opening of the show so she accepted the award for me. This is a picture of Char in a gallery viewing a painting of Char viewing a painting. That's a bit confusing and it reminds me of Alice in Wonderland, which is probably what Char felt like when they announced she (I) had won!

Photo courtesy of Jim White 

Teenaged Girl with Dark Hair

Another oil painting from a photograph of a friend's daughter. I didn't care for the T-shirt she was wearing so I changed it. Try doing that with a photograph. Well- I suppose it's possible, but it won't look painterly. ;)

Angel in Red

Angel is a woman from Taiwan who posed in her wedding dress for our portrait group. She was everything you could want in a model: beautiful, poised and immobile. I created a 12" x 16" study from life, then using the study, I painted a monochromatic underpainting from the study and filled it in using color when I went to the life session the following week. There were other corrections that needed to be made, but the basis for the painting is a complimentary color scheme of red and green.

18x24

Angel in Red

Angel in Her Wedding Dress

Angel is from Taiwan. She moved to the U.S. recently after marrying her fiancee. She was the model at our portrait group last week and everyone was inspired by her beauty.

I hope to do a larger painting of her. This one is 12" x 16".

Jamie, a Female Basketball Player

Jamie posed this morning at our drawing/painting group in her University of Tennessee basketball uniform. There is always something intriguing about every model. For me it was this model's eyes. I really liked the shadows underneath them and their shape.
20" x 21" pastel on Canson paper

Painting form the Live Model

This is the lovely Jessica again; this time I used my standard medium, oil paint. It's from the same angle as the pastel I did last week, but the lighting is a little more defined in this version.

11" x 14"

Memorializing Loved Ones Through Portraiture

This is a portrait of a lady who was very dear to me, my mother-in-law. She passed away five years ago but when I close my eyes I can still hear her gravelly voice and see her kind smile. Barb was gracious, beautiful and loving. I painted her portrait a few years ago but I was never happy with it. The reference photo I used was blurry and out of focus so the painting was too. Recently I came across a picture of her with one of the kids that was taken when they graduated from high school. This image was much clearer so I tried another painting and I think I succeeded in capturing some of her inner joy this time.

Barb  8"x10"

oil on canvas

The Opposite of Alla Prima

Did you ever have a painting that refused to die? This is mine. The poor girl has been hanging around my house for four years in various stages of completion and incompletion. I painted her on a really good support- a linen panel that seems to be almost indestructible. Well, it has maintained its surface through five reworks, including a lot of scraping.

Today I decided to rework poor Julie yet again. She was a model for a class I took with Mike Malm at Scottdale Artists School in January 2011. Malm was a great teacher. I am just a slow learner as it has taken me four years to acquire the knowledge to fix all the things I did wrong. I did have the original photo of the model so that was helpful, even though I altered her appearance somewhat. Just because I could.

I scraped off a lot of the texture but not all. I actually like the way the different colors play against each other, I wouldn't like it nearly as mush if it was all smooth and flat like a layered Renaissance portrait, I am including a close-up of the skin because I think it's really interesting how all these layers of color can optically blend together and create a fairly realistic skin tone. You don't even notice this from a distance.

This is the final version. I am not going to attempt any more revisions. Yes, I have said that before, but this time I mean it. Although, maybe I should varnish it just to be sure.

Miranda

This is a more detailed painting of Miranda, who I painted last week at the Hyter portrait group. I used my study to create an umber underpainting. The values were there and when Miranda posed I used the two hour window to block in the color. The study was very helpful. The new painting is larger and more developed and I like her expression very much. It's often difficult for me to capture a child this age and make her look her age. Usually I end up making them look much older.

Miranda

18" x 14" oil on linen

Another Portrait Oil on Arches Paper

I am still experimenting with the Arches oil paper. I forgot to bring any oil/Liquin mixture with me to the portrait group so this one was done with Gamsol only. I think it will dry very quickly, so it will be a good test piece. I need to know how long it takes with oil and without. If my oil paintings can dry in a day or two in Paris I will be able to easily take them home in the suitcase in a stack inside some cardboard. It won't even matter what size I do as long as the dimensions are small enough to fit in my bag.

This girl is only 13. Her name is Cassandra. Is it me, or are children maturing WAY FASTER than they used to? She is a pretty girl and I may have made her look just a bit older than she is. In my defense she did have on some really red lipstick.

9"x 12"oil on paper

Portrait of Robert Stone - Using Arches Oil Paper

Robert Stone died Saturday. He was a talented American writer who specialized in writing intelligent thrillers. He was 78. Stone was probably best known for his novel Dog Soldiers, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1975. Three years later it was made into a movie starring Nick Nolte (Who'll Stop the Rain?")

What I liked most about his books were the descriptive characters and settings. When you read one of his stories you feel like you know the people and you have actually visited the places. THAT'S good writing. He wasn't formally trained, but instead took writing workshops and learned by "doing". His books were authentic because he lived an adventurous and uncommon life. Although fortune wasn't always kind to him, he rose above that and became a self-made man, another quality I admire.

How many people today could get to where he did after being given up to an orphanage at the age of six by a schizophrenic mother and absent father? Kicked out of high school, he joined the Navy at 17 and traveled the world.

I am going to France in June and I want to take a light weight painting support so I decided to try out some oil paper made by Arches. This 300 It comes in a pad and is called I think Jerry's sent this to me in my last order as a freebie. I knew in advance that it would be absorbent, because I have used primed watercolor paper before as a support for oils. So I combined some walnut oil and Liquin and coated the paper with it, hoping this would give the paper a bit of "slip". It seemed to work pretty well. Next time I'll try just linseed oil if I can get the lid off my jar. Last time I checked it was pretty well glued tight.

I limited my palette to ivory black, yellow ochre, cadmium red light, alizarin crimson and titanium white. It's pretty close to the Zorn palette, meaning I omitted blue. I did add just a bit of the Alizarin crimson in some mixtures.

There weren't too many good pictures of Stone. In every photo his eyes seemed to be too open and aware. Maybe he was just one of those people who could not relax when their picture was being taken and their eyes bug out. I have been guilty of it myself. I tried to change that in my painting, by darkening the whites and lowering his lids slightly.

I'm including the underpainting I did in about ten minutes so you can see the way the paint adheres to this support. I tried to wipe out some paint for highlights and it doesn't work as well as wiping on canvas or linen. You can't get the white back again. Something to keep in mind for the future.

I can't complain about this product. I thought it performed well as a support for alla prima panting and I didn't feel like I was fighting to keep it wet. I think the absorbency will be a bonus when I travel with it as the paintings will dry faster and I can stack them for easy transport in my bag.

9"x 12"

Robert Stone

(August 21, 1937 – January 10, 2015)

An Interesting Piece of Work

A woman asked me if I could create a painting of her fiancee wrapped in a Scottish flag, similar to an image she sent me from a movie. She said her boyfriend loves the movie and had always wanted a painting of himself in the same pose. He was being sent to Kenya for a tour of duty by the British Army in a very short time and she wanted to give it to him before he left.

I managed to paint it last Sunday using the reference material below, and I mailed it on Tuesday so it was a pretty quick turnaround.

I call it Flag Guy. 11" x 14" oil on canvas