Cherrys

A page from the sketchbook. It turned out to be a surprisingly difficult composition. That is is a 9"x12" sketchbook page to give you an idea of the size.

Merry Christmas everyone.

figure #61

People seem to disagree with my opinion on these types of things but I really like how this turned out. I showed up 2.5 hours late to our 3 hour figure drawing session but after 15 minutes I decided I should leave it alone because I would just ruin the abstract simplicity that I like a lot. Loose and free is against my nature.

Wyeth

I always liked CF Payne's version of this. I hope to find some time eventually to fully paint this but the rough drawing stage has a nice wild feeling to it, so I thought why not post it.

Drawing

North Korean tea

A weekend illustration for the Weekly Standard.

sketch #65

Another collaboration with my 3 year old. It's nice to see she's got some more flow to her lines. I think she may have hurt my composition, but it's a little early to hit her with these more advanced concepts. I'm always very happy to see her draw, even in my sketchbook.

as always .03 mechanical pencil on paper, about 9"x12".

digital portrait

Just for fun. Digital painting from a interesting face I came across.

sketch #64

A drawing, from my sketchbook.

a gesture

A 5 minute drawing from a recent drawing session. I often like the gestures more then the finished piece.

Mitt in Co

Last weekends painting for the Weekly Standard. Mitt flying high.

Bond

A drawing I did for the "Drawing the Line" group show at Arcadia Fine Art Gallery.
Arcadia has been my favorite gallery around with some of the best artists for a long time now. I did this and another piece for them.

64

From a piece of Norman Rockwell's reference.

dissapointed

A very quick turnaround for The Weekly Standard and their great art director.

sketchbook 63

I am very happy with how simple this stayed.

figure drawing #60

A figure drawing from a couple weeks back. I finally got a chance to work on grey paper and work up and down the value spectrum. I liked it. The paper had kind of a waffel texture that was problematic and you can see my values are kind of spotty but all in all I liked it. I'll look for some smooth paper next time.

Sketch #62

A sketch from the sketchbook. Turned out kind of nice. I liked the graphic shape that I was able to maintain, often I start out with them but they get lost in the process.

Bernini

Another in my installment of digital paintings of great sculptures. This is a Bernini in the National Gallery. It is a great way to practice drawing and form painting with it's subtle lighting shifts. I wanted to finish this but I also think it's nice to leave it rough around the edges.

Below I've got a 3 step gif with my process in a nutshell; a drawing stage, the drawing with basic color underneath, and the flattened image being detailed out.

Son

 

A oil painting I did of my son. It is meant to be a companion piece to this painting of my daughter. It lacks some of the spontaneity and interesting elements, but I am happy with his little face and I think I've got a little of his glowing personality. I painted it for my wife and was able to paint slow enough to use it as a promised present over a few significant dates.

11"x14" oil on board

The Children of Hamelin

My Friend wrote a book that is just being released. He wanted to put together a trailer to promote it and asked me to help with the pieces. He's done an awesome job with this.

Buy the Kindle Edition at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0089PMQP0

Constituencies

For the Weekly Standard, painted quickly over a couple evenings. I'm not really happy with Obama's likeness but I like the simple background characters.

Seagulls

A painting I did a couple months back for the Friend magazine. This is one that I spent long enough on it I lost track of what I liked and didn't like. That seems like a constant problem, I am always wishing I could see something with fresh eyes.

happiness

from the sketchbook.

Frills

I came across a beautiful photo lately and had to draw it. I really love to draw hair.
I use a .3 HB lead mechanical pencil to do these. I like the softer lead but I think I burned through 2 of my lead sticks for this drawing alone. It is very frustrating when I get toward the bottom of the stick and the pencil looses its grip. I remember as a kid I had a light touch with the pencil, I would do the drawings pretty light then give them to my brother who would fill in all the dark areas with really strong strokes, these days I am stuck doing them myself.

fig. 59

The latest figure drawing, this one done in my sketchbook.

highlights

A drawing from the weekend. I'm always interested in trying to get highlights, probably just because it is hard when drawing on white paper. So I used the smudging route, which I typically am not a fan of smudging.

Queen

I came across an old photograph that I thought was pretty cool that was used as reference for this, I emphasized the hair a bit. Probably painted because of the previous post, I was reminded of a few of my favorite great artists including Ingres. I wanted to do something along his lines, but his stylization is too far beyond me.

Influences

An enjoyable exercise that has been going around lately. It was a good chance to reexamine the really influential artists along my artistic growth. Not nearly all the artists but a pretty good list of the big ones for me personally. I grew up with no exposure to any of these greats(except Rockwell), like most people unfortunately. But it was wonderful to find them and have the scales fall from my eyes.

sketch. 57

From the sketchbook.

figure drawing #58

I really like doing stale kind of standing poses but they are rare because we feel bad asking the model to stand for 2 hours. This model was game though.

2 hours charcoal on 18"x24" drawing paper.

note- I've updated the photograph of my painting below, its a little more representative of the real thing.

UPDATED Apple *painted*

UPDATED, I got a better picture. Not good, better.

So I set myself a goal to do a painting every 2 weeks, it was a fantastic goal that produced this painting and then died one week later.
The painting is 9"x12" oil on board using this drawing from a couple months back. This really is an awful photograph but I have yet to mastered the dark arts of photographing paintings. I may do a little more color work with it yet but I'm okay with it. I thought setting a time limit would be a good thing to push production, and it would, but life is always fighting back, 2 young kids and the sun going down seem to be the primary drivers.

Check out my collection of great art at the Google Art project HERE. My wife's a big time Pinterest user and I thought it would be cool if I had an account with all my favorite artwork but I've got a massive reference folder and it would be so much work to try to get it transcribed. Google's got some good stuff there though.

sketchbook #56

You may be starting to feel like your visiting Anne Geddes' blog by now but what can I say I like to draw my kids. I really do like the endless source of reference. This is my little boy, middle name Wyeth (after N.C) by the way (Mucha was too exotic).

Sketchbook drawing 9"x12" using a .3 B lead mechanical pencil.

fig. 57

My figure drawing from a couple weeks back. This is only the amount that would fit on the scanner but don't worry the rest isn't very good.

Ode to J.C. Leyendecker

Last night I sketched from a portrait in one of my Leyendecker books. I have a current illustration I am really trying to match to Leyendecker's style. It is hard because he is so good and I am just at the drawing stage. I'll post it here at some point and let you decide if its even close.

Also, check out Donald Jurney's new blog. Awesome landscape artist with gorgeous compositions, colors and atmosphere. I have limited number of landscape artists who I really follow but Donald is definitely one.

fig. 56

A detail of last weekends figure drawing. I was happy with this area, the poorly drawn body has been cropped and forgotten.

This was done on a 18"x24" sheet of drawing pad(this is probably cropped to 8" wide area), all the reddish color areas are NuPastel and the edges are reinforced with sharpened black Conte. 2 hours.

lines and shadows

Update-I think I like this composition more.

I was admiring the drawing style of Steve Huston and decided try to mimic it in a digital painting I was playing with. I love his strong lines and shadows.

Mitt

A piece of a larger composition for the Weekly Standard this past weekend, I don't really like it as a whole much today but I do like the Romney character still. Again these are such quick turnarounds I don't get much time to plan and roll it around in my mind, I'm deciding these parts of the process are very important. But I do like these projects and the challenge.

backfire

This weekends piece for the Weekly Standard. An very fast turn around, very little time to think about the composition and refine the drawing and painting, its game time. I like how it turned out. I really like the smoke that was added as an afterthought.

apple

From the sketchbook.

Bath time

You may be wondering where I got such gorgeous little models for this drawing. You may be surprised to know they are not models nor is that the real Gerber baby but my own kids. This also accurately reflects their feelings about posing for dads drawing, it is beginning to wear on my girl but the little boy is stoked, but he is stoked about pretty much everything.
This took about 3 hours to draw with my mechanical pencil on regular sketchbook paper, the kids were getting pretty antsy by the end (not really of course). I am considering painting this but I am not sure if everyone thinks its as funny as I do.

Mind the gap

Apologies for the gap in posts. I've had some projects of late that cant be shared but have consumed the last bit of my nearly non-existent available time.

A figure drawing from a couple weeks back.