Was inspired by Donk’s piece to post this up for Dirty Sunday… I’m planning on painting this in oils & acrylics… Call this the pain-staking study:

First show of 2010! Downtown Santa Rosa… This is the new piece I did for the show, I jammed on it. All in all, took me about 20 hours, about 3 days worth of work. Amy’s so happy to have herself in a piece being shown for the first time!

Flyer for the show:

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As an added bonus, new figure drawings from the Wednesday Night Sebastopol Figure Drawing Sessions….

These plein air paintings were done at St. Vincent’s Church in San Rafael. Our Meetup group got together to paint as we do every month. This first one I did in about an hour and a half, which I thought I’d spent a lot less time on it. The second one I did in about 45 minutes.

I went with a different approach on this piece. I’ve found that it’s really hard to start with a more muted palette and end on a bright note. I instead started with my brightest primary color and mixed to a more natural tone.

My gouache painting from today’s Monday afternoon session in Sebastopol. I’m not terribly excited about the way I paint figures in gouache *rummages for my Steve Huston gouache sketchbook archive*

I spent the whole weekend shut in my room painting, and these are the fruits of my labor…

You may remember these ones from a blog post some months ago. I went back and repainted these, in hopes to exhibit them. The originals to these were done en plein air, so I took them back in the studio and used photographs to finish them.

This nocturne was done a while back, but the ground was ill-defined, and I’m much more happy with the colors of the trees and such, and you can tell there is a fence in the foreground now…

A new nocturne, done from a photo I took the same night.

A brand new landscape, from start to finish, took about 7 hours, basically my whole day today. It’s 11×14, I’m happy with this painting because it feels larger than it actually is, something really desirable to have in a landscape I think.

These two were finished last week actually, but I’m now putting them up online. The painting of the nude outdoors was from the same River series from a few months back. I was looking at a lot of Arthur Matthews, I think the main thing I took away from it was making the color of the clouds more interesting.. There is a lot of variation, I think it looks a lot better than just your plain whites and grays…

This was a plein air painting done at Ghiradelli Square last Saturday. I spent a good deal of time on the buildings. I was going to attempt to add some people to this painting, but my friend who was with me suggested that I do a dog instead… I was gonna try and freestyle it, but then I thought of the store next to me, a high-end pet boutique. The sign hanging above it had a picture of a chihuahua in a ridiculous pink dress. So I threw that in the lower-left hand corner. We ended up going in there and showing the sales girl the painting. Little did we know that the little dog was in there chillin in her bed. My god it was a cute dog… Anyways, enjoy…

Been having a lot of fun playing around with the smudge tool in Photoshop..Moving pixels around with the Smudge tool instead of trying to blend with the brush creates much more exciting and painterly results… Not to mention it’s very speedy… This took about 45 minutes to complete. (I’ve got witnesses!)

Annnnnnnnnnnnd…………. Smudgy Nicole!

Boooooo

Well I thought I’d do something if no one else would. One more NDS Colors study…

And a video, cuz why not??

watch?v=8cUIhuBPdBo

It’s been almost a year since I last went to the Wednesday night figure drawing sessions, but since I’m back in Santa Rosa I’m gonna start doing this again. I think I did fairly well in the 20 min. studies, especially the last one. Her boots were awesome, I totally woulda had her wear those the whole time if it were up to me.

Also, I’m posting a pic of the piece I’m donating for the Beautiful Grim benefit. It’s a collaboration between myself and my friend Jason. It’s a photo he shot, and I’m painting it up in oils. Gonna add more to the background and change the face a bit…

This is as good a time as any to post these… Every now and again I’ll whip out the old Nintendo DS with Colors loaded on it and do some quick studies. The portrait and coffee maker are from life, and the others are studies from Femjoy, Met-Art, and a picture by John Carman. All just done for practice, of course.

And of course, the nice thing about Colors is that you can play them back. With a few extra programs you can even manage to get them up on youtube:
Nintendo DS Studies

As a bonus, 3 minute studies from my sketchbook:

After seeing Marc Taro’s sketches from the show, I thought I’d post mine up too. His basically kick mine’s ass, but hey, might as well post ‘em. There was no real modeling session for artists, so these were all guerrilla-style artwork…

I drew these pictures of my friend as she was being painted. She’s a very pretty model as well as a very good photographer.

I made friends with one of the models who held this pose for about 2 minutes at a time. All in all it took about 6 minutes to do. Props to him for holding the pose at all, I asked him how long he can hold it. I asked him how long he can hold it. He said “how long do you need me to?” I ask him if he can hold it for 5 minutes. He was like, “Oh yeah, easily.” I warned him!

My meager moleskine scribbles.

If you’d like to check out the pictures I took at the event, check out my Facebook photo albums.