Just one new piece.
Matt

In Digital Graphics Foundation we did self-portraits this week. We were only required to do Black & White but I finished that in one class period so I colored it the next.

I also finished my Life Drawing piece early. The model again, is Rabecca.

Rebecca

Rebecca close-up

Brian - One day study

Rex 1 - 4 hr study

Rex 2 - glazing

The past two weeks of Oil we worked with our palette knives. I hated it from the get go but by the end I had given up so much that it actually started coming together a little better. Loosening up was what I needed to do in the first place but it is often hard as my professor likes to keep us tight earlier on. As we are still pretty new when it comes to painting he wants to make sure he teaches us the "proper" way to paint and I understand but there are days where it would be much easier if I was loose from the beginning. I think he understands me enough to know that I can pull off what I start though. There are things I like about this painting though more things I dislike about this piece of Liz.

Next time.

In Life Drawing I set up the pose of Liz. I was wanting something straight on and composed symmetrically. I also like the slightly awkward pose. I enjoy poses that aren't typically classic. Classic poses bore me, not only because I've done them over and over and over but because everybody else has as well. Give me an unusual pose that hasn't been done before any day. For this piece I worked on pastel board which I enjoy because it is forgiving. Make a mistake? Just add more. It holds a lot of pastel and allows for smooth surfaces, yet also allows for my mark making. I like the piece, though as always there are things I think could be worked on. I need to stop doing full body poses and work larger. Working small just doesn't interest me.

The first two weeks of the summer semester are already over which means I have two new pieces added to the site. The first is from Advanced Figure Drawing 302. The model is Liz and I also have her again this week for both AFD and for Oil. I worked on a paper that I've only ever worked on once before. It doesn't like the way I work. haha The paper has to be broken into before it will take the pastel well and once broken into it only holds so much and the way I work made a it a little difficult to work with but I got it done. I am pleased with several things in the piece but yet again I am never quite satisfied.

The second piece is of Brian. I am so happy with the way the painting came out. I slapped it all down in a few days and then slowly cleaned it up over the rest of the two weeks. I have a hard time with hands. They tend to come out looking like claws and I have never been able to do them well but I am extremely pleased with the way they came out this time. I added a close-up of the hands so you can see them more clearly.

I just have a couple of new pieces today. More to come soon since the semester is nearly at an end. Only two more weeks and it just doesn't seem like enough time.

Steve

Josh

It's been a while but then again my camera has been lost for a little while as well. It was found a few days ago so I was finally able to update.

New pieces are as follows:

Advanced Figure Drawing:
Me and My Respirator
Visual Field 1
Rebecca on mylar 1
Rebecca on mylar 2
Josh and Rebecca
Liz on mylar
Liz and Rebecca
Josh
Josh and Liz

Oil:
Self Portrait 1
Self Portrait 2
Brian
Barb

If you would like to read a little more about the pieces you can visit my blog in the link in the menu above

I have two new entries for the past couple of weeks in oil. I finished my oil piece of Meg and I'm fairly pleased with it. The proportions are off but otherwise I think it was pretty successful. Next time I need to pay more attention to the porportions before I get too far into a painting and it's too late to go back.

The other is a monochromatic piece I did of Steve. The first week we focused on an under painting and then the second week we did an opaque painting.

The quality of the photos taken of the pieces are very poor unfortunately. The lighting in the classroom is very direct and it's hard to take a picture without glare. At some point I will take much higher quality pictures. I am also working on finishing up a piece in Advanced Figure Drawing of Rachel. you can check the progress on my blog. It is basically finished though I again forgot to take a picture on Friday of the progress I made so the latest picture I have is from Thursday.

I've added one new photo to my website. This one is a pastel piece I did of Rachel last week. This is the first piece I did using chalk pastel on canvas. I really enjoyed the texture. I'm working on a new one this week but I've decided not to put partially finished pieces up on the website anymore. They will, however, be found on my blog. There are a few different pieces up there at the moment.

I have been back to school for a week and a half now and I'm excited to be getting back into the swing of things. Again, just to note, I will be doing more updating on my blog instead of here. I think it's a bit much to be doing everything on both, but I will still have updates as to what exactly has been added each time I do so.

The only thing I have to share at the moment is Rachel

I'm enjoying my break from school right now. I'm enjoying it because I'm getting some much needed chores done around the apartment but I am extremely excited to get back to school next Monday.

One of the many things on my to do list was to finish my sculpture of Liz. The gold leaf turned out to be an extreme pain in the ass so I ditched it and ended up painting it with some Golden brand iridescent gold paint. The finished piece isn't as clean as I would like it to be but I'm still pleased.

Liz Torso

The last 5 weeks of school we had the model Matt in sculpture. I worked for a good week and a half to two weeks on Liz's Torso so I probably only spent 3 weeks or less on this sculpture. We did not have time or any plaster left to do a casting so I no longer have this piece.

Matt

I redid the portrait of the pug as it was too dark. Here is the new photo:

Pug

I also did a commission for a woman who gave it to her mother-in-law for Christmas. It is a picture of her husband's childhood home.

House

The last commission piece I did was a piece done to be given by my cousins to my aunt and uncle for Christmas.

Aunt and Uncle

I've added 4 new pieces from Life Drawing this week. I decided to make this week a week of studies. I'm learning that there is a lot of beauty and power in the initial marks put down on the page when drawing. Often times I get too focused in trying to be too exact and dig into my drawings too thoroughly that I end up overworking or killing a piece. A piece of art needs to be looked at as a whole and not as separate pieces drawn together. Once the first is overlooked and the latter is done then a piece falls apart and dies. Over the course of the week I did 4 pieces. Two one hour studies and two two hour studies. I feel the strongest of them all is the first one I did. I fear from there, I dug in a little too much and got sucked in to "perfecting" areas. As I practice more, it will become easier to just let the pastel be and to the piece to breathe.

Our model this week is Josh. He is new this semester and I really enjoyed him. He has some very interesting poses and he has an interesting figure to draw.

Josh quick study 1
Josh quick study 2
Josh quick study 3
Josh quick study 4

In other news I have added a new Commissions folder in the Gallery section. I have received 3 commissions recently and I have finished one of them. It was done for a coworkers roommate to give to her aunt for Christmas. The aunt is the owner of the pug and my coworker and her roommate often dogsit for her. I did the piece on canvas using a new method I discovered and I absolutely loved the feel of working on it. I plan on doing the other two commissions the same way as well and I plan on doing everything next semester on canvas as well. I love to work large and canvas solves my problem of finding paper large enough and also the problem of what to mount the paper too even if I found paper as large as I would like it to be. Now, I will just make my own canvases. :)

Pug

I am still gold-leafing my sculpture but it's coming along slowly. I think next time I want to gold-leaf a sculpture I will simply paint it. Gold leaf is a hard medium to work with when there are all sorts of nooks and crannies to get into. In the future I may only whip out the gold leaf for flat surfaces.

So much to update yet again.

I am most proud to finally be able to post two paintings I did of my boyfriend, Kyle, and his cat Pepper. Kyle has had Pepper since he was 10 years old and Pepper is now 14. She is like a daughter to him and he loves her more than anything. A few months ago I captured a couple of photos on my phone of him snuggling with Pepper and I thought them too amazing to leave on my phone, so I decided to paint them for him as a Christmas present. I had a hard time deciding which picture I should choose of the two. One seemed most clearly to represent him and the other seemed more clearly to represent her. As they each seemed to hold their own finite reality and meaning I had decided to do a two piece series. I started out with a watercolor painting but decided I didn't like it and instead decided black and white would make the piece much stronger and more to the point, so I decided to do it in the style that I did my Drew Barrymore piece. In the end I decided on doing only the piece of Kyle looking out at the viewer, because I felt it to be a much more solid composition. However, Kyle made a comment looking through my phone pictures, about how much he loved the photo of Pepper looking out. I questioned, "you like the other one too, right?" He said yes, but it was apparent he loved the other one even more. Thus, I decided to do a second piece. Back to my original idea. It was just a good incentive to do both of them as that was what I had first planned on doing. So, I started my second one and finally finished it this last week. As I am a very impatient person when it comes to presents I already gave Kyle the paintings. And I think it's safe to say that he really liked them. :)

Kyle y Peepee 1
Kyle y Peepee 2

The second thing I have to update is the sculpture of Liz I have been working on for the past 7 weeks in my sculpture class. I ended up adding arms and legs to her torso as I had plenty of extra time to do it. However, because the piece was not a straightforward piece I had to cut her up into 5 separate pieces so that I could then cast her properly without destroying the piece after removal. Once cast in plaster, I reattached the limbs and legs to the body and ended up with a rough cast of the final piece. I added several more pictures of the process being done in plastelina (oil based clay), though I forgot to take pictures of the clay piece with the limbs. I also added pictures of the final cast piece before being cleaned up and sanded. Right now I am working on gold-leafing the entire sculpture so the next update will be of the finished piece. Gold-leafing, by the way, is not the easiest thing to work with when you've got a lot of creases, crevasses, canyons, nooks and crannies to get into. It takes time but I'm excited for the piece to be finished.

The last bit of information I have to update is that I have added a photography section. I'm not huge into photography but I do enjoy it and I would love to explore the media more thoroughly. I plan on taking a photography class this summer if it is offered. The photos I have in the current section are ones that I have taken over the years that I especially liked.

The site has changed somewhat since last time I posted. Most obvious is probably that I changed the picture on the front page to a self portrait I did in pastel for my Life Drawing Final. I posted a link to the portrait itself in my last entry but since then I have added it to the front page as well. I also changed my artist's statement on the title page.

I have also consolidated all of my school work into one category. As I continue through school I realize how important it is to be able to do my own work on the side. I am, of course, for now still mostly doing school work and haven't been able to explore my own artistic desires completely but when I am able to find some time then I will start posting pieces outside of the school section. Thus, don't be too surprised if there end up being two painting sections, two pastel sections and so on. One group will simply be in the School tab and the others will obviously not.

There is also now a link to my blog. It's where I keep any daily rants or musings I have on life.

I added a few sketches to the sketch section. The first three of Rex were done earlier on during this semester. They were done to practice finding shadow pattern. The other three of Meg are from last semester and were done in about 10 minutes each with Chinamarker.

I also added a pastel done a couple of weeks ago of Brian and both a 2 hour study and a longer pose of Emmie.

The last piece I have uploaded is a second self-portrait that I finished today. This one took me longer than the last as is probably obvious. I'm not sure if I'll do a third self-portrait or not. I have a few projects that I need to finish before I can think about doing a third portrait.

Ok, now the final bit of information I have to share is that I "winterized" the logo for truffletruffle. One of my fellow Paper Source co-workers owns and opperates the candy company and I help her out with packaging and such. She asked me to dress up her logo for the holidays and so I have done so. It's nothing elaborate but I will most likely be doing more in the future for other holidays and seasons sort of like Yahoo or Google does. Anyway, you should check out her stuff, it's all really yummy. My personal favorite are the fleur de sel caramels.

Rex has been finished and this weekend I started and finished my self-portrait for my Life Drawing final. Friday during class we talked about starting and finishing and how too often an artist works on the finish and loses the magic that happens in the beginning. Not enough starting and too much finishing. So, that's what I did with this piece. I tried not to overwork thing too much. I have to say, I did go back into my face and I was actually happier with it before but I went back into it. There is still more I would do to it, but I'm going to leave it as is. I don't want to destroy the piece. I am planning on doing multiple other self-portraits since this one didn't take me as long as planned. That way, I'll just choose the one I like best to turn in.

Self Portrait

I'm not sure what happened but something clicked for me in my head and this week's drawing is by far my best ever. Last week's started coming around for me but still missed the mark somewhere. I haven't gotten a photo of it yet and I'm not sure I'm even going to take a photo anyway. But, I'm very proud of this week's drawing. Our model this week was Rex. I really enjoyed the exploration into color this week and I'm finally beginning to understand drapery. I will be experimenting with drapery for my self portrait that is due at the end of the semester as well.

I have uploaded a picture of the final piece of Steve.

This week we started with a new model Liz. She is not just new to the class, but to the school as well and so far I've really enjoyed her. We are just working on a torso during our time with her though I can't see it taking the rest of the 4 weeks we have left with her. So, I may do two pieces if I have time. We had an option to do either a torso or to isolate a section of the body to build so I may do that next.

This week in Life Drawing I had Steve French yet again. After 5 weeks of having him as a model in sculpture I had him yet again for a week. It's ok though because I enjoy Steve and I actually don't really get tired of drawing him.This is not the final piece however. I took this one yesterday and I finished it today. I will update next week.

And I also finally took a final picture of the over lifesize oil pastel portrait I did of Steve from last semester.

Ok, I have decided not to post the picture of Rachel that was done 2 weeks ago because to be frank I don't like it.

I have updated with this past week's pose by Emmie, who is a new model at school and whom I really enjoyed working with. We will be having her again in the near future so expect to see another piece starring her soon.

Nearly every single life drawing piece (minus one or two) I have done has been approximately 18" x 24" but next week I will be working on larger paper and hopefully soon I can work much much larger as I really enjoy working that way.

This past week I finished casting my sculpture of Steve and applied a couple of coats of faux bronze finish. As it is allowed to sit exposed to the air the actual bronze in the paint will oxidize and create a more realistic and aged look so I will update again next week when I get back to school. I also added a few more pictures of the sculpture leading up to the finished piece.

I believe we have a new model next week as well so hopefully I can start a new piece.

Ok, I should actually have a couple of updates, unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of my piece from last week so I only have this past week's drawing to show you. This week we had John and as usual I enjoyed working with him. I used chalk pastel again as I have been doing the past three weeks. I love pastel. I enjoy charcoal and what can be achieved with it but in the end I love working with color so much more. The picture I took doesn't do the lighting justice. My teacher wanted us to focus on working with lighting within the entire piece so instead of focusing the lighting directly on the figure as one might generally do she focused the lighting on the couch directly behind John, which threw him into a lot more darkness. I enjoyed this piece because it forced me to see the figure in its surroundings in a much different light...jajaja.

Next week I will take a picture of the pastel I did of Rachel who I had last week and also hopefully by that time I will be able to update my sculpture. I finished making the mold for my clay sculpture. The clay piece has been destroyed now so hopefully the mold is good enough to provide me with a solid plaster cast. I'm going to paint it with a metal finish so it looks like it was cast in bronze or some other form of metal afterward. I will probably update it before it is painted though so that you can see how things are coming along.

It's been a while, but I have been on a small break from school and I am now back into my third week. I have a few updates to announce. There is now a sculpture section. I only have one piece in it right now and it will remain that way for a while because we still have our model for another couple of weeks. I will periodically update it though. For now, the bust is in clay but we will be casting it in plaster eventually.

I also have a couple of pieces for Life Drawing as well. The first is a charcoal drawing of Brian and the second is a pastel drawing of Rex

Two new pieces and the last ones of the Summer semester.

The first one is an exercise I did in class today. It's supposed to be a pile of stones but the colors I used make them look more like dragon's eggs so that is what I have decided they are. :)
dragon eggs

This piece was the second of my two master copies done for my Life Drawing 201 final. I think it turned out very well and is my best copy thus far.

Bieres de la Meuse

This time I yet again have two new pieces to add. These are both exercises from nature like the mountain. The first one is a forest scene. I'm not super satisfied with it. It still seems flat in places to me, but compared to where it started out I think I salvaged it sufficiently.
Forest

The second piece is one I started and finished in class today.
waves

Again I definitely need work but it's my first time painting water. Same for the forest as well. If I did more of them then I am sure I would improve greatly though nature scenes aren't my cup of tea. They're interesting and can be fun to do since they're very loose and not restrictive. There is a lot of freedom when painting them but they may be the only landscapes I paint for a very long time. They just don't interest me.

Here is an updated version of Steve.

We have just started doing Landscapes in Watercolor and our first assignment was to do a snow capped mountain. I chose to do the Matterhorn in Switzerland. It may have a few more touch ups to do on it yet but for the most part it is finished.

Matterhorn

I have to do several master copies for my Life Drawing class and I've got one finished so far. It is Absinthe Robette by Henri Privat Livemont. I have a huge poster of it hanging above my bed in my room. I love it so much I even decorated my room based on the colors of the painting.

The painting itself didn't take nearly as long as I thought it would. The longest part was the initial drawing and then subsequent frisketing I had to do to keep the edges clean. I did the piece in watercolor and though the colors aren't exact I think as a whole It turned out quite nice.

Absinthe Robette

Well, I haven't added anything new in a while, so this time I have three pieces which I have added. The first is one I finished last week in Life Drawing. We had to work really tiny so the actual piece is like 5" x 5". I used ink and a quill.
Rex

This second piece is one which I have just finished in my Watercolor class and it is yet again another still life. I'm getting better but I'm not very pleased with the lighting in this one. I think it needs to be a lot more intense, but I still like it nonetheless.
Pullies and Flowers

The last piece is my current work in progress in Life Drawing. Everybody is working life size on kraft paper on the wall. I did that last semester so my professor wanted me to do something a little different. I asked if it would be alright to do over-life size and she said, yes, so that's what I did. It is a lot more difficult to draw on such a large scale because it forces you to step back and take a look at what you have just done. Proportions are more difficult to attain but I really enjoy working this way and would like to do more of it. This is the first time I have used oil pastel because I have always been too afraid of it. It's sort of like using crayons that have been left out in the sun because they are semi-soft. I'm really enjoying the medium though, and I am also enjoying the fact that I have a limited palette to work with so it is forcing me to use colors in skin tone that I would not usually use. It's much more expressive.
Steve

Ok, well I have a couple of updates again. One finished and one still in the works. Today I finished a two week still life in Watercolor. I really like doing still lives in Mr. Herzberg's class because I think he's really good at setting them up. He has such a large still life collection and he has a good eye for arranging them.

Trunk Still Life

In Life Drawing we have paired up for two weeks to use each other as our models. I have Khali (sp?) and she's definitely a fun girl to work with. Let's just say that's she very rambunctious and high spirited. What's curious then is that the image I am drawing of her is nothing of the sort. Not so far anyway. I plan on adding at least one more image of her if not more to the right side of the picture, but what is curious is that so far she looks very melancholy in the drawing. She has nearly fallen asleep sitting for me more than once and I think her drowsiness has come across in the drawing. I like the look. I think I might play with the fact that what I am capturing in my drawing is nothing like what she is really like. Perhaps the piece will end up becoming a sort of dual personality piece. We still have next week to work on it.

Khali

I realized there is no real way of knowing if I have posted any new pieces unless you go through each folder and can remember what wasn't there the last time you looked, so I'm going to use this as a means of alerting you to any new updates made to the site!

UPDATED 6/18/09

Each of these watercolors were done as studies in rendering shiny objects by laying down an initial wash and removing paint to retrieve light areas and highlights. I was going through my teacher's still life cabinet and came across this object. It took me a second to realize what it was and as soon as I did I KNEW I had to paint it. :)

Watercolor:
Sperm Bank 1

Sperm Bank 2


CURRENT WORK IN PROGRESS:
This piece is being done in Life Drawing for my midterm which has arrived SO fast! It's crazy to think that it is already here! I've got a couple of more class sessions to work on it though, so it's not quite finished but oh so close! I enjoy working with Rachel. She is a classic beauty. To me, she is not unlike what used to be held as beautiful and was seen in all of the classical paintings. I hope to have her more.

Charcoal
"Rachel"