Sometimes I think my art journey is one of painting in oils, loving it, slowly straying away from it into digital work, and then rediscovering oils and how much I love them. I’m in the rediscovery phase, once again, and loving the hell out of oils.
I needed to paint some more portraits for the Paint Figures Better portrait painting demo, so here we go! Good chance to dive into studying again for a bit.
I made a new Memento Mori mug because I’m a sucker for stoicism and coffee. I needed a new mug anyway and this has been a great companion over the last few weeks. I’m not really intending to sell a lot of these, but if you want one, you can buy a mug on my store here.
Ref and brushes from Rachel. Trying to work on improving my edge control. It’s a thing that seems to be really lacking in my work and I want to fix that.
This is most of the art that I made this past year. There are also hundreds of figure drawings not seen here. There was also a little bit of traditional drawing/painting, but not very much. That’s something I’d like to do more of in 2023. Hold me to that if you don’t see me cranking out oil paintings soon.
A study of Rosetta from our new reference pack, Figure Drawing: Rosetta. Felt great to be back to painting figures. It had been too long since I did any of these and I was certainly rusty at first. But I think the time away from them taught me a lot.
I’ve been thinking about mountains (as one does). I’ve realized that I want to improve some of my own paintings of mountains by:
Increasing the sense of form. I, along with most landscape painters, struggle with depicting these forms as more than simple 2d shapes. I think the sheer scale and distance of these things makes it hard for us to get a grasp on just how three dimensional they are.
Increasing the variety of materials and shapes. I can get very tunnel-visioned with one sort of material or shape language. But a lot of mountains have different layers and materials contributing to their shape. It breaks things up nicely and gives it a natural feel.
More color variety. I’m definitely guilty of this one. I paint far too many mountains with overly simple color palettes. It’s a bit like painting a figure as the same muted brown-ish color, in different values. It’s not necessarily wrong and it can be done well, but it’s not really observing all of the wonderful variation that nature is providing for us.
More interesting lighting and cast shadows. I think this goes along with the form, but if we’re thinking about form then we can also consider how mountains might cast shadows on one another. It opens up a lot of opportunities for interesting shapes and compositions.
