An award!

Red Head won second place at Vis Arts at Artrageous gallery. I have always liked this painting and apparently, someone else saw merit in it too. The nice little cash prize will be very appreciated.

 

Super Moon Alert!

Blue Moon 8 1/2 x 11 collage  PK Cravens

Go outside tonight and look at the Super Moon, the closest and largest full moon of this year. Better still, let it inspire you to make some art.!

Nearly Done

 Handlebar   16x16 acrylic collage

I added purple paint to the shirt to enrich the texture and because I thought I needed the color. I softened the color areas around his hair so that it was a little less blocky. I painted the sky light purple but it looked too depressing so I made a lighter blue/purple mix to try to show how sunny it was (as indicated by the shadows). I decided that mountains AND trees were too much in the background so I deleted the mountains.

I'm fairly happy with this but I will let it sit for a bit and then try really hard to look at it as a painting and see what could be done to make it better as a painting. There is always a point were I have to forget about the photograph and look at it compositionally and design-wise. I like that I have about 60% in midtones, 25% in darks and 15% in lights. That is a nice ratio of values for a painting.

Still working

Still refining shapes. Added texture throughout shirt.

A workshop

I lead an acrylic/portrait workshop for the PMP members on Wednesday, Mar. 27th. This was the first time I taught a painting class (have taught drawing classes in the past). Everyone was very kind to me and I learned quite a bit, so I will be more prepared the next time I teach such a class.

I worked from a 8"x 8" digital image that was ruled into one inch sections. I drew that image on my prepared 16"x 16" stretched canvas that had been ruled into 2" sections. So my ratio was 1:2. It's important that you figure out a way to make your ratio true for your image in both directions.

I worked from the photograph observing shapes and just trying to get down color on most areas of the canvas. I also showed the group how I used some of my printed tissue paper to give texture and color to the shirt.

Today I started refining some of the shapes and bringing in more of the dark shadows. I will continue to refine shapes and colors. And fix my "road". Goodness, I can't draw a straight line. I thought I would keep posting as the painting progessed so people could get an idea of how a painting is developed.

Comments would be nice!