Oil Sketch

Oil sketch painted from live. what a great exercise is to paint from live model.

The Laocoon

Finally, after all this time I finished the Laocoon. It took me a while to get it done due to the limited amount of time that I had to invest on it, but little by little it was done.
I feel that I have learned so much with this piece, I enjoyed working on it big time, I sincerely could have spent a few more sessions working on it, but one of the lessons learned is that we have to move on, it is never going to be perfect and it is never going to be exact, we just have to know when to stop. I'm happy I did this exercise and that I completed it, at moments while working on it,  I felt it was going to be an unfinished piece.  It is good to challenge ourselves and push our limits a bit more each time, it allows us to grow in all aspects. My next challenge will be a still life, I have never been to crazy about them but I think it is an important exercise, so let's see what comes out of this next project.

Shaman Portrait

Poster Studies

Poster studies are a very helpful exercise to do before confronting your actual painting, they are not exactly a sketch but more of a tonal and value study of your future painting.

They offer a clear understanding of the overall tone and temperature of your composition, they help you to easily identify big masses and planes in your subject, and resolve your drawing in a simple way without any attention to details.

Poster studies should be done fairly quickly and preferably in a small size. These examples below are about 6 in by 9 in. They were done from live models and were a lot of fun to do. I can't wait to do more of these.

Laocoon WIP

This is a very challenging exercise, and I'm trying here at all cost not to use the word "difficult", I don't want to work on this piece with my mind set that way.
That been said, I'm going to point out what I am really trying to focus on here, first big shapes, at the first stage of the drawing I looked for the general shapes of the head, then I started to separate light and shadow planes looking for more specific shapes, but always keeping the drawing simple and geometric and not getting distracted by details. That's the stage you are looking at these images below.
The next step of the process will be painting big masses of values. I will post those later on.

Torso

For the longest time now, I've been trying to focus more on portraits from natural (definitely not an easy task) abandoning for a moment the study of the body, but a few months ago, the model on my drawing session was lying down in a very dynamic pose and, I thought it will be a waste not to draw her full body or at lease a detail of it. So, here it is what came out of that session, a study of the torso. I particularly like the rhythm of her upper body in this pose.

Powerful light

This is a quick charcoal sketch from a live model I did a few weeks ago. 

Very powerful light.  It is amazing how the orientation of light can change so drastically the look and mood of the objects. In this particular case, the expression of the face, the description of the features, and the atmosphere of the scene. That's what I think was so interesting about this exercise.

My intention was not to finish the entire head but instead focused a bit more on the features of the face, trying to model the light and shadow planes.

Hands on 2012

2011 was a good year, a lot of work and practice, and I'm positive that 2012 will be a better one for sure.
My main goal for this year is to keep drawing and painting.

The more time I dedicate to this craft, the more I realize that there is no short cut to achieve great results, the only way to get better is by constantly doing it, and doing it right.

So, here are some sketches of hands I've being drawing the last couple of weeks. Hands are very difficult and interesting to draw, and is that challenge what makes them be such a fascinating subject.