Alex again

A while ago I posted the block in for this painting. I loved how it looked so much and after the advice from several friends I decided to leave it very painterly. All I did was finish the hands and do a few touch ups on the face. Enjoy :)

Danny

I probably have mentioned on my blog at some point in the past that my best friend passed away 5 years ago on March 7, 2006. It was a hellish time for myself, never mind the tumult of pain, anguish, and suffering his family felt. I had always wanted to create an image that would make me happy as an artist and at the same time memorialize Danny. Yesterday was the Danny Wust Scholarship Fund dinner where I presented his family with the portrait. He and I were fantasy and sci-fi geeks as kids and we spent countless hours playing out scenarios we imagined, always with his younger sister meeting some unfortunate doom because we couldn't save her in time. So without further wait, here is the final painting and a close up.



The painting is oils on paper on masonite and is 18 x 24. I did the drawing and mounted it in class as a demo to show them the Donato technique. For information on how to do, here's a link:
http://www.donatoart.com/technique/mounting/mounting.html

This next drawing was done at Dorian's open studio a couple weeks ago. The model donned an Alice outfit and it was an incredibly beautiful pose. I came ready with gessoed panel and paints so I can bang out a nice painting. For some bizarre reason the paint would not adhere to the surface properly and it was utter disaster. But this drawing came out beautiful, and so it wasn't a total failure.

Alex Piccirillo

Here is the finish of my portrait of Alex. Learned a lot with this technique and i want to explore it more as a means to an end as well as an underpainting. I don't think i have patience working so large with pencils, so I may be doing smaller images in the future. Nothing larger than 16 x 20. Covering large areas of the same color becomes really monotonous real fast, especially since with paint it takes all of 10 seconds to do. But for rendering the figure and getting really bright colors mixed in, it is really fascinating and easy to do. All in all this is probably the most exciting piece I've worked on in a long while, from a technical standpoint. So, enjoy the image :)

Not dead yet

I've been gone from the blog scene for some time now. Busy with work and portfolio and all that jazz. Here are two progress shots of my current pieces that I'm actually having fun working on, which is something I haven't had the pleasure of in quite a long time. The first one is for a class I'm taking at the Yard School called Realist Painting. I think I may have mentioned the technique before but Robert Kogge, our instructor, specializes in a unique method he developed over time using colored pencil and ink or watercolor washes. This is my third piece done in this technique and the first large scale one as well. It's 24" x 30" colored pencil and water color on canvas. You may recognize the sitter from a previous post when I documented my student's work. It's Alex Piccirillo, the master pastelist who was the original instructor of the class until health problems made it hard on him to teach both afternoons and evenings on the same day.



And here's a close up. It's a bit difficult to photograph work done this way, but it's not that bad. Colors are a tad off


And here's a surprisingly quick and thorough 5 hour block in I did on Sunday from the same photoshoot. This one really captures Alex, plus I just love oil paints :P