Oil painting…here we go

I recently started a short art course in a cool place called Hatahana (the station). It’s a figurative art school offering non academic art courses. The course I started is hosted by the extremely talented David Nipo.It’s only the beginning  and it’s been anything but easy. It’s a completely new way of drawing for me. This made me understand I’ve had it too easy with digital painting. I realized even more actually! That I have probably been going at it the wrong way…it was hard for me to grasp after years of drawing, but I needed some dust shaken off my fingers.  My target here is to post work and see the progress, learn from mistakes and have fun!

20*28 oil on paper (250 gram)

Here is an early work on the course. I was given a charcoal painting called Nadia by Damir Simic. An amazing Croatian artist. Drawing from a  2D image is much easier than drawing a 3 dimensional model. easier by far.  The main difficulty of capturing a model or still life is understanding  the depth and than translating it to 2D. Drawing from an image  is almost mathematicle. All that’s needed is to construct a grid on the original using a soft pencil, duplicate it on your own paper and ta-da!!! you’re ready to go, almost like coloring between the lines, you can even see the lines on my drawing. What really helped me on this was a  good tip from David Nipo. Some of you may know this…but squinting your eyes and looking at the photo as a hazy blur, really helps capture some of the darker and lighter shapes. this is not unlike sharpening the image bit bit as you up the resolution of your painting. This took me about 8 hours to complete.

16*25 oil on  paper (300 gram) .The course is mostly staring a live model, I do a horrible job at it so far…too embarrasing to post 🙂 I gave my self some homework in the form of still life of a dental cast.  I stuck to a monochrome of Whites and Raw Umber, It took abou 5 hours from start to finish and i hope to move on to colors when the time is right.

Pencil goes first and then a pen to mark the outlines a bit since i know the oil will erase the pencil and i need a placeholder. First the oils are applied in general. like the effect of averaging out the tones. Detail comes later. this is the bit I’m struggling with since i have an urge to beautify every inch before moving on. Note to self – ugly is ok!

Some work in action… starting to enjoy the smell of oil and terpentine 🙂