I painted this lemur after the tour. There are also some photos below.

I only took about 90 photos while I was there because I wanted to just watch for some of the time. I got a few good ones.

I had to take most of them using manual focus which is still sort of new to me, so I am impressed with how well the focus was on some of them. The reason for this is that while cameras are pretty good at knowing what to focus on when you are taking a photo of a person relatively close up, they don’t really understand what you want to focus on with wildlife. If you wait for the camera to figure it out, the animal will often be gone.

I think this is my favorite photo.

This is the first painting I’ve done in 2010 that is larger than 5×7.  This one is 12×16 oil on canvas. I am mostly done, but I do have one more session planned for the kind of tweaking that can’t be achieved wet on wet.

I am happy to be getting faster these days. I used to spend a lot longer working out details. Partly I think the figure drawing class I took helped, and partly just experience.

The inspiration flower came from my back yard. Not sure what it is so if you recognize it let me know. I enjoy over saturating and adjusting colors in my paintings as you can see. It’s fun.

I feel kind of cliche painting so many flowers…but they are fun and more importantly they are easy models to find, especially this time of year. Plus, flowers are pretty.

Peeking Pink Petals | 7" x 5" | Oil on Linen Panel

One of the fun things about this painting is that I actually took photographs of this piece and different stages to share.

the inspiration

This bush lives in my backyard. I like to paint things I meet personally.

the sketch

I don’t always sketch before I paint. But if I want detail, especially in things like flowers, then I do.

stage one

stage two

stage three

stage four

the final version

My concentration for this painting was adding drama. That’s why the shadows are more heavy than the inspiration photo above.

I actually had a lot of trouble that evening because I initially picked a difficult angle, and then I moved probably 15mns in and had to move a lot of the lines…so it really cut down my time. You can tell that my focus area was on the legs, and in particular the lower bent leg. The upper body looks strange because I didn’t place the fabric she was laying on which covered some of her skin. Without seeing what is covering some of the skin, the shape looks kind of odd and too narrow. Anyway…some days things click, and some days they don’t.

Week seven I was mainly experimenting with different kinds of lines. I don’t think either experiments were particularly successful, but they were interesting all the same.

I am in the middle of a painting I will try to finish and post in the not too distant future. It’s of some more pink blossoms and a glass. These days, all I am interested in painting is flowers and glass. But I think it’s just that time of year.

There are some really great buds on a bush at the back of my house right now. I am trying to decide which one of these I will paint. I’m leaning towards the second one. I really love the drama of the lighting…not that I couldn’t add some to the first…we’ll see.

Before I move on to the sketches, here are some daffodils from my back yard the other day. They seem to come up around my birthday every year, which is a nice treat. However they always seem to get a cold shock and  whither quickly. I like the focus in this photo on just one flower thanks to my amazing 50mm prime lens I got for xmas.

Now on to the figure drawing sketches. Sorry about the really heavy shadows. That’s what you get for taking photos in the evening while standing on a chair. I couldn’t be bothered to re-do them though.

Session three

15mn with a focus on the knee

30mn with a focus on the midsection

Session four

15mn cropped to focus

30mn focus on shadows

It was fun all the same and I got a few other neat photos.

In case you are wondering, the answer is yes, the saturation and color has been boosted on this lot. It added some neat blues to the tree bark among other things : )

The other week I felt inspired to paint some pistachios. Not sure if I’m done with the painting yet, but it’s been a while, so I thought I would post my progress. If I work on them some more, I will probably post the revision. But I didn’t really intend this 5×7 to be a drawn out process. Pistachios have an amazing range of color and at the time, the sun was hitting them in an interesting way.

Also, I’ve been struggling lately about what the optimal surface to oil paint on is. So far my favorite is gessoed watercolor paper. But the prep time involved is somewhat undesired and I don’t like the flimsiness. I experimented with canvas paper for the pistachios and just hated the surface. I have ordered some oil primed linen panels to try out, and I have high hopes for them. So far the texture seems right on and I like the firmness of board and being able to use a regular frame. I don’t like stretched canvas for almost any reason these days…although I realize that at large sizes it might be the best choice.

Secondly, I registered for another class at the Durham Art Center. So far this is my second class there and I love them both. Last time I took Intermediate Painting and it was great. I plan to take it again but I can really only do one at a time. This session I decided I wanted to focus on drawing. Not regular drawing though, that’s too tame. This time I decided I needed to take figure drawing for a number of reasons:

1. I have no experience drawing the human figure whatsoever.
2. I feel that the skills used in learning to draw the human figure will translate into all my artwork.
3. I tend to get very involved in detail and spent a lot of time erasing and redrawing lines. Live models don’t really allow for that. The poses are very limited and the challenge of the allotted space will be good for me.
4. I don’t get charcoal. Paint makes sense to me with blending a shading. It just clicks. I can even get by fine with pencil. When I use charcoal however, the implementation of whatever I’m doing seems to have no grace whatsoever. So I just feel like I need to get a feeling for the medium because I like looking at charcoal drawings, I just have not developed any finesse with them myself.

Next are two of my very first figure drawings! They are all about 15 minute poses, possibly 20. Obviously the shading is pretty terrible, but the proportions are okay, especially on the second one. I would love to take both figure drawing and painting during the same session if I can manage to swing it.

After two sessions, my feeling about all figure drawing is: love the instructor, love the class, love the challenge. There are a lot of talented people taking the course with me, and I really enjoy seeing their interpretation of the work. Everybody has a different style. My work has no style yet, I’m just trying to sort out how to deal with getting out of my head for 15mns and sorting out this whole charcoal thing. The only success I have had with charcoal is eraser drawings, I can make those look good (where you wash the page with charcoal and erase out the picture) but I certainly will not lean on that crutch to get me through anything.

The human body and face has some of the most interesting shadows and curves to draw (and paint I’m sure). It’s way outside of my comfort zone to confine a drawing to a time limit and that’s great. Part of the purpose is to get you to stop thinking about what you’re drawing and just draw…that is very hard for me.

From class one:

From class two:

My only regret on this trip is that I noticed that there was an “endangered amphibians” exhibit at the zoo right before it closed which I wish I had seen. I love painting frogs. Ah well…there is plenty of other great reference photos for painting from this trip…including a couple neat frogs who lived in the reptile exhibit.

In the Quarter

Street Musicians

Interesting Looking Pigeon

Buggy Tour

Street Sign

Street People Dancing to "Thriller"

Evening

Interesting Colors

Audubon Park

Duck

Another Duck, Preening

Pokey Birds (Don't know what they are.)

Squirrel on Trash Can

Audubon Zoo

Flamingos

Straw-Necked Ibis

Radjah Shelduck

Masked Lapwing

Nicobar Pigeon

Don't know this one's name.

Not sure what this one is called.

Bengal Tiger

Cleaning...

Pacing...

Elephant

Flowers

Cormorants

More Cormorants

Pelican

Requisite Aligator

Black Bear

Rhino

Giant Leaf Frog

Panamian Golden Frog

This one is extinct in the wild. : . (

Kori Bustard

Indian Roller

The reason I like this photo so much is because of the colors and the sunset. It doesn’t have quite as spectacular of a landscape as many I saw, but I was just excited about this one because I had been reading about long exposures on my trip, and I managed to use that new knowledge to catch a pretty neat photo! Aperature 3.8 200iso and a shutter speed of over 1 second.

Without leaving the shutter open for a looong time, the photo would look like the next photo. This wasn’t even a fast shutter, for the dark photo, it was 1/25 second with my max aperture of 3.8 and 200iso.

Other cameras, that are not SLRs will brag about their iso speed, but boosting iso is not the most graceful way to catch a scene like this. I did take a test shot with an iso speed of 1600 and a shutter of 1/13 and when compared to my long exposure at 200 iso this is the difference in color and noise. (ie unwanted graininess)