Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Must be the time of the year for demos.

Just a few...




The oil paintings were attempted during the community college Art Appreciation classes I teach in Paterson, NJ, while the black and white acrylic number was for my sophomore level Pictorial Foundation section at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Each demo was completed in just about an hour; the oils are of students in each respective class, and the black and white piece completed from a scrap of photo reference, originally taken for another project.

All the demos in this batch were done without any preliminary pencil drawings, just attacked with a brush from the start. The oils were completed using a limited palette of titanium white, cadmium yellow light, yellow ochre, cadmium red light, permanent alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue and cerulean blue, with some sap green thrown in for mixing up blacks and some burnt umber to tone the support. They're painted on canvas, linen, and prepared paper, respectively. The acrylic piece was completed on an acrylic primed sheet of Fabriano Soft Press 140 lb watercolor paper.

I should probably put a step by step at some point, but for now finishing an image with a dozen or so students huddled around might have been miraculous enough...

In other related news, this Friday, the 9th of December, I'm looking forward to conducting an after school oil painting workshop at Millburn High School here in NJ, working from a model and broken up into a one hour demo and two hours of supervised painting on the part of the students.