Muddy Waters in Oil

Here is another recent oil painting completed as an in-class demo. It's a portrait of the legendary Chicago Blues musician, Muddy Waters. I worked with a limited palette of colors and painted this on a 16 x 20 home-made canvas board. I worked from a variety of references, both B&W and color. I completed this in one painting session, working wet into wet with oil paint. It's a very direct process and I don't use any mediums with my oils. If I need to thin the paint at all, I will just use a bit of the odorless solvent that I also use to clean my brushes. Many of the painting mediums (including linseed oil) extend the drying time indefinitely. With tight deadlines as an Illustrator, I guess I just learned to paint without them since I was usually trying to minimize drying time.

Old Time Fiddler

This is a recently completed oil painting that was done as an in-class demonstration in my Illustration 1 course at RIT. It depicts an old time fiddle player named Kenny Baker. The references that I worked from were very different from my finished painting. Washed out, flat lighting, confusing backgrounds, and a distracting plaid shirt. My goal was to edit and simplify so that the focus was only on the essentials...a great face and his hand holding the fiddle and bow. I eliminated the plaid and added a classic western shirt style. I also kept things very raw with a limited palette and a painterly approach where some of the under painting remains visible in the finish. I worked with a similar texture on the shirt and the background to create cohesion and to avoid a "cut-out" effect. I also blurred some edges to tie the figure to the background.

Color Temperature

This is a recently completed in-class demonstration of acrylics. It is a continuation of my newer habit of leaving my paintings less refined or over-worked. When I start a piece like this, I am mostly aware of the color temperature of the underpainting. Usually the dominant color of the main subject will determine this for me. In the case of this young red fox; the oranges and yellows of it's fur dictated a warm underpainting. I built up washes of burnt sienna and burnt umber. Eventually the paint gets thicker as I fine tune and add more color. Later in the painting process, I added bits of cool colors to the shadows and background which gives the piece a bit more balance in color temperature.

Young Frankenstein's Igor

I recently re-watched the Mel Brook's classic Young Frankenstein. I was inspired to create a portrait of Igor, played by Marty Feldman, as an in-class demo for one of my RIT Illustration courses. I used a grainy, B&W screen shot for my reference. This allowed me to discuss how to work with inferior reference material as well as inventing your own color palette for painting. I encourage students to gather the best reference available but also concede that it is not always possible. This piece is 11 x 14 and was completed with mixed-media.

Versatile Gouache

I have always loved gouache as a painting medium. It is underrated and often misused, strickly as a "poster paint" to be applied in a flat hard edged manner. Illustrators of the 1950's used it extensively and several of these masters (Bernie Fuchs, Harry Anderson) employed it in a very painterly fashion. Early in my career I was attracted to gouache based on the work of the west coast Illustrator, David Grove. He was very innovative with his compositions and fresh application of the medium.

I struggled for years to get the effects that I was searching for in my own experimentation with gouache. I would complete a few unsuccessful studies and then go back to my oils or mixed media. But, I would always return to try again. I am drawn to the color range and consistent matte surface. Above are a few 11x 14 gouache landscapes. The lake scene is re-worked from an earlier version and shows the possibilities of softer, more atmospheric effects.

Fall Colors

Despite the busiest Fall quarter that I have experienced at RIT since I started teaching here in 1990, a few faculty have still managed to gather on several Friday evenings to draw from the model. These are two of our best models and their stamina for holding poses is impressive. Each of these pastel drawings were completed in under two hours on a warm grey, 22" x 32" printmaking paper. The more that I draw from life, be it plein air landscape painting or figure drawing, the more I prefer it rather than working from photos. Direct observational drawing is the ultimate"blank canvas"! You translate the 3D real world to the 2D drawing/painting world and this observation must filter through your individual brain. No two artists will see it exactly the same way.

Pastel Figure Drawing

Fall Quarter at RIT is about to begin which means that faculty figure drawing is also upon us. Faculty figure drawing consists of a handful of faculty (4-6) who enjoy working from the model and the social aspect and camaraderie that is also connected to this activity. We meet weekly for a three hour session and no one critiques or comments about any one's individual direction. This is purely for us...the individual artist! We play good music and lose ourselves for a while. It is so cathartic and fun! This is a drawing from our last session where I started to use pastels. Prior to this I was working conservatively with only B&W media. That's part of the joy in this process...we get bored or confident and decide to push forward in a new direction. This piece is on a gray toned paper (22"x 32") and took about two hours to complete.