Portrait Painting

I've been painting more and more these days. My goal is to speed up and not be that perfectionist that I mentioned in my figure painting post. Back at CCAD I did get pretty good at painting fast because if you fell behind in your assignments, especially first year, you would most likely fail. I had a classmate - Vince Vollo who used to drive me crazy. He had an amazing talent. For every assignment he would churn out masterpiece after masterpiece. But most of the time the night before class he would destroy the completed piece, then pull an all-nighter creating an even better masterpiece for class the next day. Looking back now it was probably the best thing he did for himself, creating great self-discipline.

Here are a couple of pieces I created for an illustration class. The first one is a self-portrait. I don't think it's a very good likeness of me, but I've always loved it. It was done in Dr. Ph. Martin's Dyes and after 20 years is just now starting to fade.

This is a gouache piece. I always found gouache to be an extremely hard medium to use and never really mastered it's qualities. It is a medium much like watercolor, but a different ratio of pigment to water and some chalk is present - resulting in a more opaque finish. This may have been my last gouache piece.

This is a current acrylic piece in progress. I can't show you the entire painting because it may spoil the surprise for one of my family members. If they are loyal followers to my blog then they will figure it out, but I have my suspicions that they only visit after I prompt them to do so. You know who you are - have you figured out the suprise? I promise to show the completed piece - after Christmas.