Tweaked Painting..

Same painting but I tweaked it abit. I think it looked better. I think if you made a painting and you are not happy with it, there is still a chance you can improve on it. There is nothing much you can do really but to increase the value and saturation and maybe lift some color.

Im still not giving up on this painting though...maybe I can still worked on it.:-)

Experimenting

Woke up very early today at 6am (early for me! lol) and I painted  the above portrait. I honestly dont know what I was doing but I was going for a moody, sad sort of portrait. Instead It looked like I was playing with watercolor. In between me doing the laundry and painting, this is ther result.

I hate the paper I bought online and you can see with the above painting why. The paper looks like its been scratched and I dont know why.Anways, I still have loads of Arches paper and for me, Arches is the best. I used 140cold pressed.

I painted the above portrait late last night when my sons sleeping already so I guess I have no excuse for messing it up.LOL. But I want to record my progress as an artist so I decided to post these paintings anyway.

Still dont know my siganture style..but I know it will come to me.

Another portrait, different skin tone series

 ok, so the second portrait from the series I will make is a brunette colored girl ( is that correct?)
The original reference photo has gingham checkered blouse. I started painting the squares individually, but who am I kidding right? I just don't have the time, between juggling with hamlet and my house chores. hahaha,

So I kinda "suggested" the check with this effect and just hope for the best!

The technique for this portrait is mainly ( patience?? ) glazing and layering of colors to achieve the one color of the skin. So I started using red, yellow and eventually to darken the skin, violet hue ( mixed)

The hair is a bit challenging too but I think I did a pretty good job.

Till my next post.. don't know what to paint yet but I know an inspiration will come to me eventually.

Portrait-light skinned blonde girl

I don't have the right colors to achieve the correct skin tone for this portrait, so what does a girl like me do? Go on ahead and improvised!  Flesh tone colors are winsor yellow, cadmium red (suppose to be Alazarin red and scarlet lake) and permanent rose.

The eye color should have been a turquoise shade of blue, but I used a blue green with yellow instead.

I will probably do this portrait again. I learned a lot and can't wait to do more.

Moody Portrait - watercolor and eatercolor pencil

Recently bought a watercolor book that teaches different techniques. The book teaches you to experiment with different mediums, techniques and tricks. The above portrait is one of the excercises that teaches you how to create your own tone paper.

I used watercolor pencil mainly but the base started as a wash of cerrulean blue and burnt sienna with yellow ochre.

this was my first try. I used chinese white (gouache) for opaque effect. On the right is just a wash effect using watercolor pencils (Derwent) which I like better. I like the way the texture of the paper and some of the unwashed pencils are see n here, although I don't think the portrait was very good ( no reference)

My first Monotone portrait-Failed step by step

This is my first monotone painting..ever. I have been doing a lot of research on watercolor paintings and one of the important tips I read about is that beginners must first master monotone painting before graduating to color.  This is from  David Lobenberg ( he has a blog and teaches watercolor in the US )

So I decided to do my first monotone painting. Using my green, red and blue colors (first time I used this brand of watercolor tube, Reeves because usually  I just use Prang ) to mix this sort of a grey color.

Looking at it now, it looks like blue green to me, so maybe next time I will add more blue in the mixture.
I used my usual 150 cold pressed paper. Hopefully I can do more monotone paitings for practise..

oh and I took a photo of the sketch because I wanted to record my step by step process just to give me a referrence but then I got caught up with my painting that I forgot! Oh well, maybe next time!

Till my next post!