Last week I was able to go to a painting workshop with Bill Perkins. Bill is a very experienced artist who has done a lot of things. Check out his two websites
here and
here. He described this workshop as "color boot camp" designed to teach us as much about color and light as possible in just three days. He had us do many quick (30-45 min) paintings from the model under different lighting situations. I really enjoyed the colored lights, but the flat light situations were particularly challenging. It was a lot like doing plein air paintings, but of people rather than landscapes. He kept telling us not to worry about our drawing since there was no time for that, and so some of those sketches look pretty bad, but I thought I'd post them all up here anyway because I wanted to show the whole experience.
A lot of what we talked about was familiar, like starting with just values and talking about tonal contrast before moving on to saturation and hue contrasts, which is the way I teach digital painting. But there were some new ideas too, which really shouldn't have been new to me but somehow I managed to come this far without understanding them. Overall it was a great experience and I am excited to try out some of those new ideas in a painting when I can spend longer than 3o minutes on it.
And if you are interested in seeing what some other people did at the workshop
Greg Newbold has blogged about it, and I thought
Simini did a really nice job of capturing those colors.
The NBA finals start tonight, and I might actually watch this time since the Lakers aren't in it. And since Dirk and the Mavericks were the ones to dispatch the Lakers, I hope they win. Unfortunately, I don't think they will because as I was working on this portrait of Dirk, my wife said, "Oh, are you drawing Jon Heder?" And although that was probably just because of some drawing errors on my part, I realized that no one who could ever be mistaken for Napoleon Dynamite is going to beat LeBron and Wade.
Sometimes, just for practice, I will paint the clouds that I see outside my office window. I painted these yesterday, which was an exceptionally good day for clouds.
I kind of lost momentum with the iPad sketching, and went back to the real paints. Here are the three that I thought turned out the best from the last few months. I have had the pleasure of teaching some classes in the BYU illustration program this fall, and one of those classes was a landscape class where we went out plein air painting as a means of studying light and atmospheric perspective and then applied those principles to illustrations. I did the top image in that class. It must have been a nice spot because a lot of the students got a good sketch there too. Kind of surprising since it's Utah Lake...not known as a very picturesque spot. I have realized that I really like yellow and blue together. Almost as much as yellow-green and purple.
