Male Nude

A painting from life last Tuesday. Not a particularly good likeness, but I am satisfied with the result.

Wednesday Night Portrait

I also belong to another figure drawing group that meets on Wednesday night. This painting was from last week. This group is different in that the poses are shorter. We start with a series of 1 or 2 minute poses and work up to longer ones, generally not longer than 20 minutes. I will draw the shorter poses in pencil and then switch to watercolour for the longer ones, although I have been trying to work on my drawing more lately.

Queenie

This is another Tuesday night life painting. I really had a hard time with this one, but I think I nailed it. After the initial washes I completely lost the drawing. This has a lot to do with the lighting in the studio where I was working. If you are far enough back, and I tend to be since I don't usually get there early enough, you are outside the well lit area and it is sometimes hard to see what you are doing.

The model was not of course a Queen but my treatment of the pose gave her a regal arrogant attitude. This is what I find so interesting about figure drawing. 

There is another painter who, on one of my first nights did a painting of the young man posing. If you looked at the model you saw a guy sitting in a chair; looking at the painting you saw a self assured, confident young man (a good likeness of the model, in other words not a completely different person) regarding the world around him with a slight sense of  indulgent humor. This is what that painter saw in the pose. Was this a conscious decision? In his case I do not know. In my case I do know that I tried faithfully to render the model in the pose. It was at the end that I discovered that I had conveyed a certain attitude that the sitter may not have embodied. Is this intentional at a subconscious level or accidental? Is it a result of taking something in the pose and pushing it and arriving a logical but not necessarily anticipated destination.

Charles Reid did a painting in oil of two figures. He had started out painting a young women but as he was working he felt something was missing and literally grabbed a man off the street and added him to the painting, entitling it Friends. Even though these people were complete strangers there was an attitude about the portrait which led him to give it that title.   

Quick Figure Painting

Here is the promised painting. As I said yesterday, this is a quick sketch done at the end of the life drawing session. I do have a tendency to finish quicker than a lot of other people so I usually change position and do another one

Most of them have some flaw or other (due to speed, experimentation or lack of thinking) that makes them unremarkable, but this one turned out OK.

I do have another session this evening so I will have more for tomorrow.

Figure Study

This is the upper half of the piece which I did last night in my weekly Life class. I had the feeling that my figure work was getting too drab as I starting using more earth tones to get the dark values correct. In this I was concentrating on getting more colour into the work.

I am a great admirer of Charles Reid's figure painting, particularly in watercolour. I think even though the drawing leaves a bit to be desired I think that I have done a pretty good job in terms of edges and keeping a connection with the background.

If you are interested in seeing the whole work please get in touch.

Figure Study

As I have previously mentioned I belong to an Art Club that provides the opportunity to paint and draw from a live model several times a week. This is the figure study which I did yesterday. I have cropped it down from 15 x 22" to about 11 x 16 because of some overworking on the left hand side. 

Overworking is the bane of the watercolourist. It usually starts with an attempt to improve some part of the painting, which most times leads to then trying to fix that part because the improvements didn't work. It may stem from the feeling that whatever one is painting is the best one has done or at least pretty good and in an attempt to make it even better, ironically it gets worse. Many an artist talks about how they reached a certain point at which they were very happy with what was going on and then proceeded to ruin it.

It has been said of painting in general, and this applies particularly to watercolour that it requires two people to paint; one to do the painting and the other to take the brush away and say, "Ok, you can stop now, that's enough."

The Sphinx

This is a painting which I did yesterday from a photograph in a magazine. In the past I have felt  badly about doing that and justified to myself that it was "only for practice." I have since discovered other well known painters who also use photos or images from various media which they some times refer to as "found images" so I do not feel as if I am cheating. Others may of course disagree.

This is a 1/2 sheet; 15 x 22 inches and I have decided to call it "The Sphinx."

Please also visit my website at The Framing Dames -

http://theframingdames.com/mayne.htm

Girl with the Green Earring

I belong to an art club that provides the opportunity to paint and draw from a live model a couple of times a week. This is a portion of my painting from last night.

I have observed from this group as well as others that a lot of people tend to paint themselves when drawing from a model. Their finished figure has their mouth or nose, or has the same shape of head. If they do not notice this, then it only follows that perhaps I would not notice when I am using my own features rather than those of the model. But if the whole process is unconscious than how would you know?

If you are interested just leave a comment and I can send you a picture of the whole piece which is a half sheet watercolour -15 x 22 inches.