Oil Painting Notes, Defining the Features

Oil Painting Notes, The Basic Planes of the Head

VOGUE OIL PAINTING SERIES

Vogue Series 8

I’ve been working on this painting for a few hours now trying to capture the gesture, I’ll let it dry now and move on to something else. I don’t want to over work it too soon.

Oil Painting Notes, Painting the Negative Space

VOGUE SERIES 8

I started Vogue Model number 8 tonight, again no detail at the early stage just blocking in color with big hogs hair brushes.

I’d like to mention some good advice a friend of mine gave me when I was having difficulty in class capturing the likeness of an assignment.

She said to "try painting the negative space" (Thanks Pat ! )

This little bit of advice has turned out to be a big help.

The negative space is that empty space between the arms , legs ,contours in fabric, the space between the figure and the end of the canvas ect.

When you stop to look there’s negative space all over and it’s a great guild to use in keeping your drawing on track.

Now that I’m mindful about sizing up the negative space, I wonder how I ever got through a painting or drawing without using it.

Painting the light, in oil paint

Vogue Series 5


I focused on painting the strong sun light on her hair and the shadows on her face hidden deep inside all the hair.

I still haven’t touched the hand yet, but I’ll try to work the light into that as well.

Time flies when your painting

Vogue Series 6

While working on this one I started to get the feeling that it was late, but I didn’t think it was after midnight !

Time flies when your painting ....now I got to clean up and get my 4 and half hours sleep.

mixing grays and blacks in oil paint

Vogue Series 7


I started this painting by blocking in the large shapes in the general color.

Limbs Venetian Red, Naples yellow, Titanium white and the dress pink.

The back round is a mixed gray. I hardly ever use gray or black from a tube these days.

It helps me to squint while looking at the reference photo, this makes everything blurry. If I just paint the blur I won’t get hung up on the details to early.

At this stage I just want to capture the gesture.

I'll let it dry now and move on to something else.

Vogue Series Oil Painting

Vogue Series 5

So I stuck with painting number 5 for a while adding some interest with color and fluffing up that hair a little. I’ll stop here for now, when I come back I'll tighten up her face and hand.

Mixing Black in Oil Paints

Vogue Series 5

I went back into painting number 5 and tried to render the light in a more dramatic fashion.

I mixed my blacks from Phthalo green, Napthol Red, Phthalo blue, Burnt Sienna and Quinacridone Megenta.

Shadows help add dimension in oil painting

Vogue Series 4

I went back into painting number 4 with a clear idea as to what I wanted to do.

I wanted the dress to be abstract and for the shadows to add dimension making the figure pop off the white backround.

I’ll put it aside at this point and contemplate if I should go further adding detail to the face or leave it vague. In the mean time I’ll start working on another painting.

Multiple oil paintings with little pressure

Vogue Series 6

When I get to this point I just stop and start another painting, or go back and work on an earlier one. Feeling no pressure to add detail or fuss with it at this stage.

Vogue oil painting in progress

Vogue series 6

Blocking in general colors.

Recycling used canvases

Vogue Series 6

You may be able to tell from this shot that I’ve been recycling used canvases. I’ve been doing it for all the paintings in this series. I just find an old painting I hate and smooth it out a little with the palm sander (80 grit paper ). Once in a while I’ll leave in a little texture from the old painting just to add some interest.

Oil painting working wet on wet with liquin

Vogue Series 3

After this painting was dry I coated the whole canvas with liquin and jumped back into it, working wet on wet.

Oil Painting Vogue Series

Vogue Series 5

This gesture painting was completed in about 20 minuets. I quickly put it to the side to dry and went back to working on painting number 3. When I felt things were slowing down on number 3, I moved it out of the way and started a new painting. I’m trying my best to avoid procrastination and maintain spontaneity.

Vogue Series number 4 Oil Painting

Vogue Series number 4

Again I started this painting very quickly , mixing a few left over colors from the last painting to making a gray. Nothing fancy here just a rough sketch to get things going. Now I’ll let it dry and move on the another painting.

Quickly roughed in the gesture of oil painting

Vogue Series number 3

I quickly roughed in the gesture then blocked in the general colors of another oil painting today, but before I got into any detail. I put it aside and started another painting.

The art of overcoming procrastination

Vogue Series number 2

Day two I started another painting.

I’ll let the first one dry and come back to it with fresh eyes but for now I just want to move on.

I’ll take this second painting as far as I can go but before I start procrastinating too much on what to do with it, I’ll start another one.

Sort of like and assembly line, add a part and move on.

Oil Painting, A New Direction

Vogue Series number 1

In an attempt to take my work in a new direction I’ve decided to start a series of paintings to explore the figure, gesture, foreshortening ,color, and painterly brush strokes.

Using the Vogue Model as my subject I’ll work crudely at first to capture the gesture’ then move on to the next painting. I’ll continue this process till I have many paintings going on at once, stopping when I get stuck on one and moving on to the next avoiding procrastination.

Hopefully with this process I’ll be able to increase my volume of work while maintaining a high quality.

I’ll set no time limits for this series because lets face it shit happens, but I will commit to it and log in as many hours in front of the easel as possible.

From time to time I'll stop to post pictures and explain the pace and process of my work.

This first painting was quickly started in class, after a few hours of work I put it aside and went on to the next.

Still life in progress

This is a still life that I started in class and continued to work on at home from a reference photo I took .

I wanted to have less negative space in this painting so I adjusted the composition a little by cropping out the flowers from the white & blue vase along with altering its opening from the original.

I have the green vase going off the left side of the canvas to suggest it’s mass, as I didn’t want this to be the perfect still life where everything fits on the canvas perfectly.

I’m experimenting with an additional element in this painting in an attempt to create a feeling of movement. I’m still not sure how far I’m going to go with the white moths but I loosely added them into the scene to see what they would add to the piece. Eventually I’ll add more detail to them and I’m considering having them hover all around the angel figure.

Kitten study, oil painting

I worked on this kitten study a little more just to finish it off. I haven’t painted someone else’s work in a while, but I feel its necessary from time to time to not only study the methods of accomplished oil painters, but to practice mimicking there techniques on canvas. I feel it helps me to get inside there thought process of applying the paint to canvas. Perhaps its similar a student guitar player practicing Smoke on the Water. It's not always as hard as it looks you just have to practice practice practice.

Finding a balance between life and creating art.

After raking leaves in the yard for most of the day I found myself to worn out to paint....So feeling a little guilty about that I got to wondering, just how do some people stay motivated to paint on a regular basis?

I see some artist on line producing a staggering amount of work and I ‘d like to know the secret..... what the hell keeps them going? Don’t they ever get tired or stressed out ? I wonder if these people have day jobs ?

I worked on my truck for one whole weekend and that was enough to put a lid on the oil painting for the whole week. If I have a bad day at work ....forget about it, can’t paint. I like to stay in shape so after a good work out , trail run or mountain bike ride I’m usually to keyed up or to beat down to pick up a paint brush. Then there’s the cooking, cleaning and fixing everything that breaks around this old house...it never ends.

There are times when I just can’t find the balance between oil painting and staying afloat. I can’t even begin imagine how people with children do it.

I look forward to the day when I can focus all my time and energy on my art, but in the mean time, I’ll just have to keep looking for that perfect balance between life and creating art.

Small oil paint sketches

I got caught up in a lot of traffic on the Parkway Wednesday night and I missed my art class. I still felt like painting something but ....nothing that was going to give me a bigger headache then I already had from the traffic. So I cracked open a corona and did some small oil paint sketches.

Ernie Barns

Many people may know his work from the TV series Good Times. His name was Ernie Barns and he was the artist behind the actor JJ Evans on the TV show.

Barnes came to painting after a career in professional football, as an offensive lineman with the San Diego Chargers and Denver Broncos. Teammates called him "Big Rembrandt."
He could take on a defensive lineman, then commit the encounter to canvas.

I found it interesting that he never painted his subjects with there eyes open.
"We don't see each other," he said once in an interview. "We are blind to each other's humanity."

I came across this beautiful tribute to the late Ernie Barns by J Ivy, the music is from the Marvin Gaye song I Want You.

I think the words of this song say it all, Ernie Barns was an amazing man who's work inspired so many. He will be truly missed.

Art therapy reduces anxiety in kids with asthma

By Rachael Myers Lowe
NEW YORK | Fri May 21, 2010 3:19pm EDT

(Reuters Health) - Draw your own conclusions: Researchers suggest in a small new study that art therapy makes kids less anxious about their condition.

The results provide "encouraging initial data" that art therapy can help improve the emotional health of chronically ill children, the authors write in the May issue of the Journal of Allergy & Clinical Immunology.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 7 million American children, or nearly one in 10, have asthma. The breathing disorder is a leading cause of school absences.

For children, "simply thinking about past asthma attacks can bring on feelings of anxiety," the authors write, and anxiety can either precipitate an episode or worsen an otherwise mild one.

In art therapy, children work with crayons, paints, and other materials, guided by a therapist to express feelings that they may have trouble communicating in words.

"It's not about painting pretty pictures," Anya Beebe, an art therapist at the National Jewish Health in Denver who led the study, told Reuters Health. "It's about helping people go deeper, and using art as a process to express and release their feelings."

Although art therapy has become more common in hospitals to help children cope with the distress of their illness and hospital stays, researchers haven't yet rigorously studied whether it works in asthma.

Beebe and colleagues enrolled 22 children between the ages of 7 and 14 with persistent asthma. The children were students at a school on the campus of National Jewish Health in Denver; 11 were randomly assigned to have art therapy along with their usual asthma treatments for 7 weeks, and the others had usual asthma treatment but not art therapy.

The children were tested using several standardized measures for coping skills, anxiety, worry, self-concept, and quality of life before the first therapy session, at the end of the last session and six months later.

At the end of seven weeks, the art therapy group had lower anxiety and higher quality-of-life and self-concept scores than the group that didn't have art therapy. The improvements persisted, although they were not as pronounced, six months later.

Calling the results "striking," Beebe and her colleagues write that "the use of art therapy for children with severe, chronic asthma is clearly of benefit."

Beebe said the results were gratifying but not surprising. "Kids tend to feel better after doing art therapy," she said.

The researchers did not study whether less anxiety would decrease the number of asthma episodes, nor decrease the amount of medications children need. But "physical health and psychological health are often linked, and we do see that link in children with asthma," Beebe said.

The cost of art therapy varies depending on the institution, and some hospitals offer it free. According to the American Association of Art Therapy, it is difficult to put an exact price tag on it because it may be billed as part of other services.