Hoodie girl

I did this one on a small (4x6 inches) piece of masonite for a change of pace. It's always fun to paint on different surfaces. I noticed right away that I had gotten used to the feel of working on paper in my sketchbook because this surface didn't "give" at all to the pressure of my brush, but hey, at least I didn't have to worry about the paper buckling!

Down to two!

As I've mentioned before, I use a limited set palette for these quickie paintings that consists of white, black, yellow ochre and red. I recently read about a REALLY limited palette of just two colors so I thought that I'd give it a try...just white, burnt sienna, and ultramarine blue. With this small range to choose from, you can still get some nice warm and cool color relationships and an interesting variety of colors (a lot more than I'm showing in this one). This makes me want to play around with some other color combos!

Violin practice

I don't do too many horizontal format paintings but some subjects just work better that way.
One of the liberating aspects of these small paintings for me and one that really separates them from my professional work is just being able to leave things alone....like here, the bow and the fingers are described just enough so you know what's going on but they aren't rendered out precisely.

Red Top

Usually for these quick paintings I stick to headshots. Once I get into arms and legs and hands etc it becomes a lot more complicated and time consuming and let's face it....more like work. But , I have been thinking that I should start to do more than just heads...so here's a torso! Eventually at this rate, slowly but surely I'll get to full figures :)

white shirt

I've noticed that the recent painting have been pretty dark which is odd since it's Summer and the world is so colorful! It may have something to do with the fact that I usually do these at night in a dimly lit studio ;) Whatever the reason, I needed a brighter girl, so here she is!

Cloaked

I've got a folder on my computer of "cool photos" where I put pics that I think are interesting and some that might make good painting subjects. Case in point, this painting was done from a photo of the daughter of a friend of mine (Hi Rachel!) at a science fiction con where she was trying on a cloak. Costumes at cons seldom look too good especially in the flourescent glare of a crowded convention floor, but in this case she made it look just right. In fact, I'm thinking she should wear cloaks all the time;)

Another happy girl!

There is a reason why a lot of artists paint expressionless dead pan type faces....painting smiling happy people is hard! I suppose that I like the challenge of it and it's also nice to have someone smiling up at me while I'm working ;)
I'm constantly inspired (and humbled) by great artists like Sundblom who seemed to do it with such ease.

New profile

Here's a quickie. I really like to paint profiles, there is so much variety in peoples faces and profiles break that down to the basic form. I suppose that a lot of artists avoid them because they can sometimes seem static but there's something very iconic about them to me.

Girl in a different format

Sometimes I like to use unusual layouts to give the art a different feel.

more sketches

Back by popular demand...er, well one person asked ;)
Here are some more quickie brush drawings from my local Barnes and Noble cafe!

Witch Hat!

Sometimes I start my just squishing some paint around and following where it goes instead of working directly from a photo. Once this one started to make the turn towards looking like "a girl with a witch hat on" I used a photo from a catalog to get some face details down.

White hat

I love the way artists like Frank Benson and Sorolla paint white objects, full of color!

Thinking about fishies

Fish, yeah, I have no idea.

Iron man!

Being a long time comic fan I couldn't resist a quickie Iron Man. Gotta admit that I prefer his old armor though, but then again I'm old ;)

Moleskine sketches

I carry a small pocket sized moleskine sketchbook when I'm out people watching in the world. These days I draw directly in ink with a Japanese brush marker which works well for these fast and loose sketches. Drawing in ink rather than penciling things out carefully keeps the drawings much more spontaneous and since people are constantly moving anyway I can get things down very quickly and move on to the next one!

Molly Crabapple

I'm always on the prowl for cool photos that might be good subjects for my quickie paintings. This one is from a photo of illustrator Molly Crabapple that I found on her site. The photo had that modern/retro feel that I love and I thought she had a real Elvgren-ish expression on her face!

Animal pals

I set out to paint a horse since I hadn't done one yet and the duck just kind of snuck in. I had a photo of a duck on my desk and I thought it would be a funny juxtaposition to add him to the scene. It's wacky, but I can't help smiling when I look at this one. Maybe it's because I am a sucker for those nature shows where the animals all get along!

Banana clipped!

I guess you'd say that this is a painting of a girl, but to me, it was that white shirt...oh yeah and the banana clip in her hair that got me.
Oops, looks like I forgot to sign this one...

Smokey tones

Sometimes a painting with a lot of brown tones just looks like mud, but I like the somber feeling in this one.