while i have enjoyed digital painting for over a decade now, i have only recently begun my journey with oil paints! i decided that i needed more fundamental skills, and i have generally preferred traditional art over digital since experiencing burnout a few years ago. the supplies have been quite an investment on my limited disability budget, but i'm enjoying myself very much! it feels like i should've been doing this all along. this is a page for me to log my learning process and works in progress.
more churning for portfolio work. also yum pomegranates. immediately took down the still life after i took the pics and went to finish cracking that one open to eat it
.JPEG)
i love big horsies :) i even have a giant tattoo of 3 draft horses on my hip/thigh. i dont get to spend that much time with horses anymore (i got to do equine therapy at bad kid school and it was the best thing ever) but i love to draw them. the reference pic here is from cowgirl magazine. i did this alla prima in 4 hours
i keep seeing people on the oil painting reddit paint their childhood photos and i wanted to paint my childhood photos. dug around for a while and was really amused with my block tower in the original taking clear inspiration from downtown los angeles, where my father worked at the time.
.JPEG)
i walk my dogs past the pool in our neighborhood at night and i always admire the water and reflections. i saw one perfect angle one night but didnt take a picture then and i havent been able to find it again. still, i took a bunch of photos and picked one to start work on. i bought cobalt teal especially for this
.JPEG)
seasonally appropriate still lifing! dug the most interesting little gourds out of the trader joe's $1 bin and arranged them together for ostensibly more portfolio work. i always like the orange/green color combo i think i read some tumblr post a decade ago that claimed it was the most difficult color pairing to handle (i think while discussing van gogh's the night cafe) and my contrarian nature immediately wished to master it. idk abt mastery but i still use it a lot
.JPEG)
crankin more shit out lol. not super creative but not everything has to be a genius idea. bought apples mostly to paint them but i did eat them also. they are honeycrisps. yummy. even my photos of the arrangement looked painterly so i know this ones gonna be good
.JPEG)
.JPEG)
more portfolio stuff :P the zorn palette is a historical set of colors used by anders zorn in many of his portraits, made up of yellow ochre, vermilion, ivory black, and lead white. lead white is poisonous and i switched in my napthol red for vermilion instead of the typical cadmium red swap but it worked pretty well! you can get an impressive range of skin tones out of these four colors so it really does excel for portraiture, but the lack of blue and green stings me. good exercise anyway! this was also my first successful alla prima <3 done in 3 hours! wet on wet is hard man. photo reference unfortunately from a deleted user on the r/drawmensfw reddit
.JPEG)
i'm signing up for a college painting class in the spring and making a portfolio to prove i don't need to take the 101. like clearly i know how to paint. i went through a bunch of various painting 101 syllabi to find what's often taught in it, monochromes were a common assignment! i picked out some random items as usual, another cat figurine from my grandma's house, a jar i got at the goodwill bins that needs repainting but it has molded strawberries on it, a couple bottles of nail polish idk why they just were the right size, and a mesh reusable grocery bag for texture. this is done in ultramarine, ivory black, and white, plus the sepia oil pastel i sketched it in with
.JPEG)
.JPEG)
i did a lot of cute doodles while raising the monarch caterpillars i've been talking about on my gardening page and i wanted to paint one too! simple as. this is kinda a composite reference in the end, i wanted a fun pose for the cat but my pictures sucked and i couldn't find a good pose in online photos. i'm skimming through a few photos while i work for the different bits, we'll see how it goes!
.JPEG)
i am a big maximalist (junk collector) and i have some fun shelves in my room. this one is the most visually pleasing at the moment and i wanted to paint it! it holds a little bowl i made in pottery class, a venetian jester doll i got at goodwill in ventura, a roman plinth styled candle holder i thrifted somewhere i dont remember, two cat items that hold stuff? one is a toothpick holder i think and the other is maybe a vase? i got from my grandma, a candle in a bumpy cup from the target dollar section a couple years ago, and a pretty cup from marshalls and they are all in gold and green that matches the walls. the whole big shelf is golds and greens actually but this level of it looks best lol. anyway i lit the candle for the reference photo and burnt the underside of the middle shelf a little <3 whoops
.JPEG)
.JPEG)
trying a new kind of still life! grabbed a couple $4 flower bunches from trader joes and arranged them in a pleasing manner in this vase i had on a shelf (i think it was my sisters once and it lived on the floor in the bathroom for a long time until i washed it and put it in my room). half the flowers are pet toxic and i dont have a workspace that my cat cant get into (i work solvent-free so usually shes allowed. yeah theres cat hair embedded in everything) so i took them outside and took dslr photos to base the piece on so they stay outside and i can keep working after they wilt
.JPEG)
.JPEG)
so when i was 13 i really loved the song 'sexy can i' by ray j and i was reaaally sheltered and for some reason i couldnt conceptualize the lyric 'no panties no shirt' as meaning the woman was naked on the pole (actually the reason is that my father wrote some local laws about nudity in strip clubs and other similar establishments about a year before this and he told me about the work because i used to ask about his cases to have something to talk to him about and therefore i thought fully nude strip clubs were illegal everywhere and not just in certain areas of los angeles county. yes a lot of rap music confused me back then) and i decided to try and draw my bratz doll in my idea of what the stripping outfit could be. when i finished i immediately felt such intense pubescent i-dont-know-im-gay-yet shame that i tore up the drawing and put the pieces in a cup and soaked them in water to blur the pen and mashed the wet paper up into a ball before i threw it away. all that to say this painting is me reaching back in time and telling 13 year old me that its okay i draw naked women all the time now and even get paid for it occasionally <3
.JPEG)
.JPEG)
one of the reasons i wanted to get into oils was to do plein airs. the full on the go setup is heinously expensive to put together, so im starting on my patio where i can just sit at our old table and carry my stuff in and out in a few trips. my neighbors have nice gardens and the light is always really pretty in the evenings
i didnt like the proportions in my first sketch so i did it again! ill paint over the other one with something else later. comparing a sketch to the washed over version i continued with
first pass of color! i couldve used my brain a little bit more when placing the foliage blocks
second go! i really really like how the lamp head turned out, its crazy how little you need to do to call the effect of shiny metal. decided to simplify the background a bit too
i guess that's a bit disingenuous of a title considering my digital background, but it's still a first! i set up a still life with a rainbow high doll and a little porcelain cat my grandma gave me when we cleaned out their house on a backdrop of one of my shirts with my multicolor lightbulb set to blue for more dramatic light and jumped right in
in the middle of the first layer! i think i was about to quit here and then realized i should get everything covered on the first pass
first pass all done! and extra shiny lol. this stage is always really charming to me i love her blobby little face and i felt like i did well with the colors
well now this one is a little scary isnt she. she really came alive in this one and not in a good way! i was focusing on adding contrast and details in this layer
i have skipped a layer of updates bc i was playing with my cat during the time the last shown layer was drying and she knocked over the still life :/ so i had to reconstruct it and it was a frustrating paint session of redoing her hair and trying to make sure my shadows mostly matched and i forgot the photo. onto this one, i do like the new hair on the left side a lot better! this is when i got the gamblin 1980 paints and added brighter blues and better purples
more refining away... i think this is when i decided her nose was not good and redid it because i was thinking of it too much as a nose and not the shapes of color that it needs to be. or maybe that was the next one.
i got a little carried away blending and highlighting in some spots here lol and my paint was a little too lean for this stage but its ok. i decided to call it with the next layer (maybe 2) so next its time to go back and add contrast again. but im much happier with the background now, i feel like its really come together!
oooh shes so close to done now. i have a few little tweaks and some details i need to put over fixes i did this time but then i think thatll be all! yayyy <:) i like her!!
.JPEG)