Starting to paint again

Over the last ten years I’ve painted very little, only a few animal portraits and nothing else. I’ve had new paint and panels sitting around the last couple of years, with the intention of diving back in…it just took a while to get there.

Before I get moving full force, I thought I’d warmup with a self portrait. Traditionally, I dry-brush large portions of my paintings…but paint, mediums, and retarders have come a long way, so I’m trying to work the paint more like oils…it’s producing pretty good results so far.

This is part of the self portrait which I’m currently working on. The head is life size. The weather hasn’t been cooperating, so I’ve been spending more time working on the left side of my face, and will pick back up on the right side when I have stronger light from the window. Winsor & Newton glazing medium has proven to be very useful for blending and tinting…far better than using water, or regular medium.

I made a minor wrong-turn a few days ago when I impulively decided to dramatically change the lighting. An hour into darkening the left side of my face, I realized a made a mistake, and spent the rest of the day repainting and reclaiming what I had covered up.

Likenesses

These Qui Gon Jinn and Buffy sketches (click the "continue reading" link to see the Buffy sketch) are a result of a potential client, requesting that I provide examples to demonstrate my ability to create a likeness accurately.

I noticed this page was getting allot of hits so I updated the above image as I had edited it after posting...my roughs are rough, but the older one had been too rough for Dark Horse so I had smoothed it out.

I don't like to copy images, for many reasons, but creatively it narrows what you can do with the character as you must always match the body pose to what face angle you can find...I much prefer doing whatever pose I want and then extrapolating the face from several photos. I've painted portraits throughout my life, so I guess if I have a "thing", faces would be it, and this background is a big benefit to do likenesses and faces in general.

These sketches landed me the job and I'll fill in the details once the work is published.

Dog Portrait Paintings

These are the photos of the dog portraits which I was commissioned to paint, last month.  The original photos I was given were soft in areas, but I was able to use secondary photos of the same breeds to fill in the gaps of detail. Both portraits are painted with acrylic on Strathmore 500 series illustration board, the boston terrier is 15"x15" and the griffon mix is 13"x13".