Update On That Personal Piece

As promised a while ago, I'm finally digging into some personal work. I fully intended to be deeper into things by now, but as I mentioned earlier I had five pieces to work on. Originally I'd planned to paint these five pieces no larger than 16 inches wide by 12 inches tall. But after talking to a few of my fellow artists I was convinced that I should go bigger. I settled on 24 x 18 instead and went to work. From the beginning I had a lot of reservations about the increase in size, and to an extent I wish I'd followed my gut as I'd likely have finished them a lot faster and left more room for my own work. What's worse is that their completion was delayed a full week after one of the pieces was damaged. The necessary repair was far more extensive than I'd expected and needed to be done before I could submit it. Such is life, I guess. Anyway, while I wish they'd gone faster, I admit that I kind of like that they're bigger. Next time, though, I'll be listening to my gut.

Anyway, the last piece left the house yesterday and I finally got some work done on the large canvas. Not a whole lot, mind you. I spent more time than I'd have liked at the local FedEx office dealing with shipping the last piece. Shortly after I arrived there, the power went out and they were unable to send or receive because they had no juice to run the scanners. It was pretty typical of my luck.

Either way, here's a shot of the piece as it stands this morning. Okay, not the entire piece, but the part that's actually been worked on.

Basically, I've been tweaking the face a bit and have finally started working on the sweater. Weirdly, this is the first time I've ever had to tackle something like a sweater and the fact that I'm shooting for a loose weave sweater is adding to the challenge. Oddly, it's got a chainmail quality to it in that you can see layers beneath it. That I'm ratting the sweater up isn't helping either.

Once I get a better handle on the figure and am happy with its proportions and values, I'll start covering the larger areas. I find that my brain works better when its reacting to something. Sure, I could figure the whole piece out in studies and just paint as the studies indicate, but that's not fun to me. I'd rather start out with a value and color structure in my head, move in that direction, but keep things open to whim. I like to build up focal points to a certain level of finish then branch out. Admittedly this can cause problems, but it also makes each day of work interesting. What I end up doing may not be what I intended to do.

Anyway, that's where that piece currently stands. Aside from this piece, I'm making changes to the cover of the third Badass book. Rather than show process shots of that, I'm just going to show you both versions of the finish when it's done and talk about why I changed what I did, etc. That should be coming sometime in the next couple weeks. In the meantime, I'll be posting further progress shots on this painting as they happen.