What a Winter!

I love painting outside when there is snow and this winter is driving me to distraction.  All this snow for so long and it is too cold to paint outdoors.  I switched to oils because watercolours froze and this winter it has been so cold that oil paint gets to be about the consistency of play-do.

The up side is that I am spending more time working on portraits.  Last week in class I did a pastel sketch of Kim so this week I took my oils.  I have been struggling with pigment selection and getting the forms correct so I decided to work the same way as I do for landscapes.  I toned the whole panel with yellow ocher and then added some darks and rubbed off the lights until I had a decent value study.  I then started adding colour.  This still has a long way to go but I am excited about the start.  The background, her hair, eyebrows shirt etc. are all still the under painting.

I need to get outside.  I am actually debating painting the view from my studio window.  Yikes!

Another good day

We had a wonderful model for our sketch group today.  Zoe is the granddaughter of an artist friend and she did a great job of posing for us.  She is a talented young lady who writes and sings her own songs.  She posed with her guitar which caused some artists a lot of grief but since I only do head and shoulder portraits is wasn't an issue for me.  There are a couple of problems with this and the digital image isn't great but Zoe was a pleasure to do.

I need to get painting

What a winter.  All this glorious snow and I have either been too sick or it has been too cold to stand at my easel.  We just spent three days in Ottawa and it was -25 almost the whole time.  I was looking forward to painting in the Ottawa area but needless to say I didn't.

I have been struggling with portraits in oils so for Katherine's class today I decided to take my pastel pencils and sketch.  Kim is a great model with wonderful features and it was a treat to just relax and draw.  I am happy with this.  I kept it loose and managed a decent likeness.  Next Tuesday I plan on staying for both the morning and afternoon sessions to do the same pose in oils.  I can't wait.