More landscape studies

All using reference from Reference.Pictures, of course.

New Zealand

This one took longer than I expected. There were a lot of subtle value arrangements and not much color or value range to describe a bunch of a different forms and materials. I love pushing out of my comfort zone with these.

Wadi Rum

A couple paintings of Wadi Rum, Jordan for #JuneStudyJam. Really glad to be expanding my repertoire of landscapes and brushing up on those skills. Excited to put this new book together.

Landscape studies for #JuneStudyJam

Finally joining in on all of the #JuneStudyJam fun and working on some paintings for a landscape painting book.

The first half of #MaySketchaDay this year

I’ve done #MaySketchaDay a few times now and I’ve always managed to generate a lot of ideas for potential paintings to finish. I also like to set special challenges for how I’m going to do the sketches. Last year I did imaginative figures, to push my figure painting skills. Another year I did them all based on Blender renders.

This year I’m using Midjourney to generate images and then painting over them to make the sketches. It’s a controversial approach but I think it’s good to learn how to use these tools. We’ll see what the future holds for all of us. I’m still hopeful.

Studies in oils

I’ve been working in oils a lot lately and have been very lax about actually scanning them. So here we go!

I’m really enjoying working traditionally again. There’s something so uniquely real about this work. It’s both incredibly unforgiving (in that you can’t easily make big changes, move things, etc.), yet also oddly easy (brushwork automatically looks better).

I used a couple different surfaces for that. Most are done on oil paper and a few are done on gessobord. I’m meaning to get back to doing some work on linen, so I think that’ll happen this coming week. I’m a sucker for working on unstretched linen, ever since I watched a demo by Greg Manchess back in the day.

Nudes in my sketchbook

Working on my figure study skills in oils, in my sketchbook. Prepping for a new Art Camp course on oil painting and seeing if my skills developed in Paint Figures Better translates over to oils (they do). Reference from Rachel’s phenomenal Vine-Covered Nude reference pack.

Figure Painting in Oils

Back to oils

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.

Portrait practice

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.