Master Copy - Rockwell

Here's the final Rockwell copy, had lots of fun rendering this guy out and learned a ton. I think this is probably one of my most successful oil paintings to date, both in the form, color, and drawing.

This one was super useful to study to learn some stuff about color, and Rockwell's form is so clear that it's really great to study to learn facial features.

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Master Copy - Rockwell WIP

Here's a new image for today. Apologies for not updating over the weekend, I was out of town visiting with family, teachers, and tasty oil paintings, and I figured your inboxes would prefer to be asked forgiveness than permission.

Anywho, this is the beginning stages of our latest assignment in head painting class, which is to copy a piece by the great Norman Rockwell. Needless to say it'll be no easy task, but I'm looking forward to it.

I tried to focus a lot on this drawing, cause most of my portraits so far have fallen apart in the drawing more than the painting, so I worked this all up in perspective, made sure to compare distances between features and wiped out and repainted any errors I could find. I think it was definitely worth it, the likeness isn't perfect but I think the structure is solid. There are some issues with the eyes and nose that I fixed but didn't get a chance to photograph, so it should be in pretty good shape. We'll see tomorrow when the rest of the painting goes down!

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Master Copy - Assael

Here's a quick-ish oil painting done today, which is a refined-ish color study of a piece by Steven Assael. The original piece was brought up in our head painting class last week and it absolutely blew my mind, the concept behind it is white light theory, which is that white light has a full spectrum of color in it that will play across surfaces and create a ton of color variation.

So though my piece is nowhere near as good as his, this is really exciting to me cause the lack of the white light theory is what made me dislike traditional work pre-school, cause everything I saw was just dull and local colored, it lacked the light and life I saw in digital stuff. It's really exciting to find that digital stuff is all rooted in traditional work that's been around forever, and it can be achieved without any color dodging.

Woohoo! Oil is teh bomb!

Master Copy - Fechin

Here's a painting I did today which is a copy of a painting by Nicolai Fechin. Lots of fun!

The main goal was to further understand the limited palette we're using in oil, which is titanium white, yellow ochre, cadmium red light, and ivory black. You can create pretty much every color out of those four, just the cools are relative and muted, so a lot of the color relies on the color that's around it.

This was a great exercise not only to understand the palette, but also understand how to mix color, as well as see subtle color variations and paint them. Learning to mix the right hue, right value, and right chroma and then putting down just one correct brush stroke where it needs to be is hugely important, and it's one of the secrets of making effortless looking work. Needless to say, I'll need a lot more practice!