Aerial vehicle

Aerial vehicle design, oil on A4 illustration board.

Sitting figure

Sitting figure with a cow skull. Oil and acrylic on board 29x 41 cm. 3 days. This is based on a similar life study drawing with sanguine pastel. I wanted to see if I could now render a more realistic result without copying from photograph. I did a preparatory color study prior starting. At first stages the figure was very dark in color so I wanted to test Delacroix's famous quote "Give me a piece of mud and I'll paint a light skin with it, just let me decide the surroundings." Well what do you know, darkening the background later with a mix of burnt sienna and ultramarine blue did make the skin look white.

Master copy WIP (updated, May 4)

 See latest stage here (September 4): Ingres copy almost finished

May 4, working on background and details 

We're having a drawing and painting course where we need to copy some piece of art. I chose The Valpincon Bather by the French master Ingres in order to practice the very difficult nude painting genre, particularly depicting skin, as an arguably logical continuity for the intensive life study workshop I attended and also because figure painting and drawing is a classical measure of artists skills and some videogame, film and animation studios may ask for references of figure painting for evaluation of the concept artist or animator candidate's skill level.

Here's the initial charcoal drawing, then the underpainting stage where I have drybrushed titanium white on earth green. Then on to glazing and background.

Friday May 20 I added some glazing and worked the surroundings further. Sorry for the bad cell phone photo, the flash light reflects from the wet surface unfortunately. It was difficult to find decent reference images of the painting, some were obviously taken at close range, giving a bit fish-eye effect which explains the strange wide shoulders. This is 120x80cm, 80% of the original's size and I have to speculate the colors between several reference images, thus, I'm putting my expectations to 80% success for the time being.

Commissioned portrait

Oil on canvas, 46x56cm. I was commissioned to paint this portrait of the customer's father who passed away years a go. There were only two low-quality photographs of the person available so the customer wanted a painting as a memento. According to her, the man was a down-to-earth, warm-hearted person keen on nature, and that should be apparent on the portrait.

I had to study some more in-depth color theory to work on the colors and lighting as the reference pictures were flash-lit or pale, unnaturally flat-looking. I learned quite a lot from the process and gained more confidence. It was pretty laborious to get the proportions right and achieve a resemblance. Everything has to be just right, not too dark, not too light, not too sharp, not too obscure. Fine-tuning took hours.