Portrait of my boys
Jun/101
Portrait of 2 boys in red
This is my latest painting. These are 2 of my sons, Eli and Garrett. They both decided to wear red shirts, and I kinda liked the idea. I ended up pushing a lot of green into the fence to compliment the red. I think it turned out pretty well.. although in the painting they look older than they really are.
On this one, I was trying to go pretty tight and really go for the realism. I had been looking at some of the wonderful portraits from the portrait society of America. These get me really excited.
It’s definitely the best skin tones I’ve done so far. I’ve also been looking a lot at Bouguereau lately – the master of figurative painting. Neutral grey is the key to painting convincing skin tones. I have relied too much in the past on burnt sienna, which is a wonderful earth tone red – but is on the orange side. Here I’m mixing naphtol red with b. sienna – and that is better. But you have to temper everything with grey.. that’s the key.
Garrett’s face (on the left) was repainted 3 times, and Eli’s was done twice. It’s challenging because it works best to paint the face in one sitting – while the paint is still wet. So you have to nail it in one shot. It’s really hard to make adjustments later, because you can’t blend into what’s there once it’s dry. I haven’t quite got the blends perfect, but I’m getting closer.
A little detour into fantasy
Mar/100
I’ve been itching a little to work on a fantasy painting, so this is my first real shot.. probably a bit strange, and not sure how successful it is. It started out as an idea of a figure crouched atop a rock, in a tall vertical format, lowering something – to accentuate and play with the tall & vertical feeling. But I wasn’t really sure what the story would be – or what exactly he would be lowering. I just liked the compositional idea.
The composition didn’t quite come together the way I would have liked – I think the canvas actually should be even narrower for the image I saw in my head. I thought about cropping it in even more – but then I had the idea to add in the rock tower on the left, and that seems to help get at what I wanted to do. But it’s not perfect. However I do like how I handled the background with the muted & lighter tones… I’ve been wanting to do something like that for a while too.
My son Aidan modeled for the figure – and I took some shots of myself also. The rock tower is from Camp Baldwin earlier this summer, and the water is from Eagle creek, in Oregon. The dragon is from eagle creek too – a secret enchanted spot that I can’t reveal.
Gallery on conceptArt.com
Dec/090
Finally added my art gallery up to ConceptArg.com. I didn’t realize that was free and fairly simple. Their site has a few php glitches but I was able to make it work..
http://www.conceptart.org/index.php?artist=wheelercreek&cat=updated
I actually debated being part of that site for a long time. There’s so much absolutely amazing work up there, really phenomenal, but also there’s a lot of sex/violence and offensive content. Well, I guess you just need to use your own judgment in what you look at…
As an artist I take a lot of inspiration in seeing what other artists are doing, in terms of light, color, characters costuming, all kinds of things.. but I’m aware that I have to be really careful too because of the standards I’m trying to live by.
