We Got a Winner!

 

Every year my favorite art store hosts painting contests based on different brands of paints, color pencils, pastels and more and every year I plan to enter one and somehow, I end up missing out. Well this year I made sure to enter the fall painting contest for Soho brand paints, and ended up receiving honorable mention, which is awesome. 

The painting that placed was “Michonne” done in Acrylics on Canvas. It took me about 5 hours or so to complete. As with most of my work, I started with a rough sketch, (in this case I sketched it in Photoshop). This was followed by a detailed under drawing on canvas. After which, I sprayed the canvas with workable fixative and began to paint. This painting is probably one of the most complete paintings I’ve done, it has not only the face of my subject but accessories her to identify her.  You can watch the process of painting “Michonne” below, or by visiting my youtube channel. 

Rough Photoshop Sketch

Final Sketch Close-up

Painting With Oil Pastels

Happy Holidays everyone! Recently I completed a pastel portrait as a holiday gift and it turned out pretty darn good. I hadn’t worked in pastels in over 10 years but for this particular project, I decided to break out a stash of soft oil pastels and see how it would turn out.  

The tools I used in this project were:

·      Mungyo Soft Oil Pastels

·      Blending Stump

·      Acrylic Paint

·      Krylon Spray Varnish

The portrait part of this painting was done entirely from the pastels and I chose to use acrylics for the background. I found that painting with pastels is really quite similar to painting with oils or acrylic paint. I did however find that it’s a little bit difficult to get fine detail with the pastel crayons but I was able to gesture in or suggest certain details as opposed to making them finely detailed. I also found that instead of using mounted canvas as my subsurface, I could have used pastel or Bristol paper or un-stretched canvas. All in all, I’ll definitely do more pastel work in the future, so stay tuned.

New project #1

As of today I have 3 pretty big projects I’d like to get done before the end of the year. One of which is a long overdue portrait of an awesomely cool little boy who just so happens to be my son *smiles*. This portrait is going to be a digital painting. Why you may ask, simply, right now it’s easier. I may go afterward and do this same painting in traditional medium but I hadn’t decided, I’ve really been having fun drawing and painting with my tablet lately. I do plan to post this one to my YouTube Channel so stay tuned. The intention with this composition is to paint my son after the likeness of his ancestor who shares his same name.