Portrait studies 3

Exercise: Still life with colourful objects

For this exercise I focused on complementary colours  green and red and initial decided on a combination of a pears and strawberries:

Was not entirely happy with the scale of the objects, should have spent more time on working out the composition, so I abandon this painting and started a second...

Slightly happier with this one but didn't feel it met the aim of the exercise... don't immediately get a sense of the colour choices made... background colours too distracting perhaps.



Next attempt, given up on pears and strawberries (yes I know I can't blame the subject matter) I went with apples and a red stripped tea towel

Yes this is better, drawing of the objects not as fussed over and the red of the tea towel certainly helps to highlight the French Golden Delicious apples in the foreground. 

Impatient as ever I did not allow the first washes of the tea towel stripes to dry completely before applying shadows at the base of the apples... not a good move waited a little longer before highlighting some of the creases in the tea towel with a blue wash.

My favourite painting to come out of the exercise was the colour study...

Portrait studies 2

Portrait studies

Ist week back at work after Christmas, try to soften the blow (if I have to travel in to London) with a couple gallery visits also conscious of the fact that both the exhibitions end this month, Facing the Modern The Portrait in Vienna 1900 and Daumier visions of  Paris. 

Friday night visit to Facing the Modern was just the right inspiration I need to make the most of my watercolours over the weekend. Seeing the portraits done by Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, although done in oils, I felt had quality that you would get from watercolours.

Exercise: Composition of an interior

In this exercise I have done three paintings of the same interior view,  doorway in to kitchen,  but changing the source of the light in each painting.


Light coming from light source on right hand side with in room:

Light in centre of room:

Light source outside of room:

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Exercise: Imaginary Rooms

Here we were instructed to create a interior picture focusing only a couple of piece of furniture. Looking at my studies I think I probably should have left out the windows making to obvious statement about the light source which I think may have limited my options in the second half of the exercise. 

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 In the second part of the exercise I have painted the same imagined rooms altering the light source. In all three cases the light source is more subdued.. more mid-tones in the studies and no strong shadows

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