Holy Canoli

I'm on fire painting wise.  Each and every painting I enter into lately I feel like I'm learning in leaps and bounds.  The only hang up I'll have is when I stop for the night and enter back into the image.  It loses some of the spontaneity and if I'm not careful I find myself just picking away at it rather than making bold choices. 

Tonight I finished up another cow painting.  It was in a dead spot and though the image read okay, there wasn't any love to it.  So I went in and made some high contrast changes.  Shadows that had been in a place holder sort of a state while I worked out the value got loaded with deep rich colors.  I'll post pics tomorrow on that one.  Then using only one large brush I blocked in a portrait of Tully.

Now as you may or may not know, portraits were a sticking point for me for a long time.  Never mind how difficult they can be, but since my mom was so good at them, they intimidated me.  That's part of why I'm so excited about my progress tonight because none of that was happening.  My friend Jeremy inspired this painting.  He's been doing an incredible series of paintings.  Each one is a new take on, or version of a John Singer Sargeant woman.  All women.  I had been toying with the idea of taking a photo of a little woman, in a Sargeant like pose and sending it to him to see if he'd be interested in tackling it. 


First I found this photo of a young girl

Then I took some shots of Tully in a similar pose.

Then I fell in love with the image and blocked it in and had a blast working my way through it.  It's far from perfect but I'm learning a ton by working this way.  Fast and focused with no diddling around on small details.  Argh yummy yummy paint.  So satisfying.  Pictures of my work tomorrow.

And now before the coffee wears off I'm going to tackle writing.  I've pushed past whatever block I had going on before and now I just need to keep up with myself.