Final Semester Week 12

I am now into the last month of school, and the last month of my undergrad at PAFA, so I will be spending as much time in the studio painting as possible. My solo show at Rodger LaPelle cam down last weekend and I am happy with the good sales that happened, especially in this bad economy.

So now its the last sprint till the finish line and the ASE. Like a runner running through that pain or stitch in my side, I have to keep the pace. In my portrait class with Scott Noel I got to put in a bit more time on the big paintingScott set up and is himself the central figure in. Now its all the changes one deals with from week to week, class to class as the set-up and the lighting conditions can alter in small and in big ways. but eventually you have to nail down things and move on.

I will have one large painting for my Wall at the ASR, this painting of the crowd of riders inside the train I take to school. I saw this cool scene before me while riding in so I took my Iphone and snapped a dozen or so of pics in a panorama, covertly snapping in an arc across the car. I stitched the patchwork pics together in photoshop and they didn't of course match up perfect, but it gave me a layout which I could do the drawing from. I made a support of luan, whichis very light and has a great surface and which I cradled on the back, primed it with 4 coats of acrylic gesso and then 2 coats of Windsor Newton oil primer.

Then looking at the layout I gridded off the panel and the layout and drew in the painting directly on the panel with Van Dyke Brown in a terps wash.

This is where all the comics drawing and animation background and layout drawing skills server me so well. Once I found the vanishing point it went pretty quick and 90 minutes or so this picture was laid out. I kept it loose and of course made so many adjustments and changes sine working from the pictures created all kinds of "holes and tangents" that I had to fix. I moved heads and hands, all kinds of things as I wasn't trying to exactly trace what I saw in the pictures but to essentially create a space with figures in a specific atmosphere of light. The painting is 3 x 5 feet and so I have to move back and forth a lot to see the whole thing.

This is a picture of what I did in my second session I started working in very broadly and directly using the biggest brush and a Speedball litho/printing roller to mass in things.

This is the painting after my work on it last night, my third session and a detail of a few of the faces below. I aim to keep this one juicy and very "Sargent" in my touch and approach

I can't wait to get back to the studio and paint on it today!