Thursday 30 December 2010

'Wolf Head'

Well, almost into the new year, hope everyone had a lovely Christmas!
I try and take photographs of my paintings during progression to post on my site and also to use as a visual aid to show to my students. I thought I would post one of the oil paintings I completed for my exhibition to show the stages involved, actually it was the very last one I finished for the exhibition pretty much a week before setting up!

The first stage is just a simple pencil freehand sketch onto gessoed panel before I then add a thin layer of lean oil paint as a ground and take out any areas I want to leave light. I then start to lay down layers of translucent washes in picture 3 making sure I keep the paint lean and loose. 
After that stage has been allowed to dry I start building layers of translucent and opaque layers in a 'fatter' paint, the outcome is that some areas have the early layers showing through and other areas have a lot of opaque paint, this hopefully gives an illusion of depth to the fur. I also decided to change the background colour at this stage to frame the wolf head and once dried the final painting can be seen on display at the exhibition!









Wednesday 8 December 2010

Visiting Art Group

I had a lovely couple of hours last week showing a local art group around my 'Into the Wild' exhibition. Thank you to all who turned out in the rather bitter weather to listen to my pontifications! If you check the photograph below they all seem to be smiling so hopefully I didn't go on too long!