A new semester, a new course, this time I am taking "Five Themes for a painting Project" with Patricia Claro (http://patriciaclaro.blogspot.com/).

The course, in short is as follows: you have to choose a piece of art and copy it in black (optical) and white. After you have to cite this piece of art in a piece of your own with a restricted palette (Primary Red, Lemon Yellow and Cerulean Blue) to finish later with a triptic or diptic of your own. Sounds challenging isn't it?

I began with a copy of Vermeer's "The Girl with a Pearl Earring" I am quite proud of the result, and my teacher also liked it very much, that means a lot for me since she is a great, and well known artist.

After the nude from my previous post I did an incursion on abstract, painting the following with acrylics. The design was based on a collage I made with several cut outs from magazines.

I have some fun, but I am not really convinced of the result, some people like the painting but I am not convinced of the artistic quality of such a painting. I consider this somehow "decorative" instead of a piece of art.
Following my incursion in the realm of abstraction I continued using acrylics (the preferred media of my teacher, Ricardo Fuentealba-Fabio). This time I painted something related perhaps to Pop Art. The subject is a US Army Mug from the Research and Development Command (my favorite mug) and an arab shemagh I bought in Iraq, the local touch is a the strand and label of tea bag of a popular Chilean local brand which comes from the lid. I painted the background with a sponge roll as I saw on John Myatt's series on TV: the one were they were painting on the style of David Hockney.

In the following painting, still using acrylics, the theme was conflict. I got my material from the Internet, the composition was done based on a couple of photos of some palestinian kids playing soccer and a Israeli chick which was walking on the street carrying a gun. I mix the subjects and I got the following painting. The girl now is watching them on the desert. I think the idea was not bad, but I could not get the result I wanted. The painting has a quite "Comic Style" that I did not wanted this time. Anyway, a the end I participated with these three painting in the exhibition organised at the end of the course.

Many people liked them, so I guess I should be satisfied, but I think I have still a lot to practice and learn.

Human figure

My first human figure painting, oil on canvas. In this ocassion I sketched with a brush with burnt sienna directly on the canvas, and began to apply shadows and some colors.

The next session I continued defining forms and enhanced shadows and textures.

Later on I began adding some lights, and defining forms a little more

I continued working with lights and on the background. Finally decides to finish the foot, but I was not very happy with it because the model change the original position.

The last session I continued refining some details, and change the foot position to a more natural one. I do not consider the painting finished, but I abandoned the work for now.

Award

I participated in the Autumm Salon of the Chilean Society of Fine Arts, and I got a Honourable Mention Award for a grafite Self Portrait on paper I published peviously in this site. This was the second award I have got form three times I have sent works to contests. The first ocassion I was five years old, and I got an award from an Airline contest by depicting how comfortable were their flights with the Caravell Rolls-Royce. The second time I was a teen and I failed on getting into the jury's taste on a Soviet Union Embassy Art contest about the theme: "The Worker"; there I participated with a Lumberjack with indian ink. Now, the third time I am on my fifties, and I have got this recognition. Probably I will keep participating.

Pastels Trial

I tried to do something with pastels, just about one hour trying to work a still life on paper. I was nost satisfied with the result but it still valid as an exercise.

Cartoons: 1975 - 2006

In 1975 I enter the Military Academy, among the many activities there I was part of the "Journalistic Circle", we edited a school newspaper, dedicated mostly to comment life inside the Academy, poetry, historic ancedotary, and of course, pull the leg of senior cadets and officers. There I got published some of my first cartoons.


In this one above are depicted the feelings of most recruits during their first field exercices. The one below was about the extreme vigilance measures that were taken during the military government to prevent terrorist attacks.

I swear Captain that I was sure he was a terrorist trying to introduce a bomb into the Chimmenney

Almost 30 years later I tried to 'resucitate' the humor, but this time using it as a way to see with a a very personal and crictic eye some aspects of the military life.
Below is a sketch in a notepad of a cartoon drawn probably during a break at the office.

Personally I liked more the office uniform rather than fatigues which most prefer so I tried to present my arguments here:
-I think this is the most comfortable uniform we have.
-I do not think so. I think the best one are the fatigues.
-How can you say that? The fabric is harder, all wrinkled, and boots ar more uncomfortable that shoes!
-To begin, you did not notice dirt, and I do not need changing shirt every day...

Unfortunately I lost the final version, but below there is a middle stage version during photoshop processing:

Here another one: I could not understand why you could not use an umbrella to walk from the parking lot to the building: it was not par of the uniform, but come on! how do you prefer arrive to the office all soaked? and the raincoat was too warm.

Also I never liked the winter office uniform, it was not very 'functional', just good looking. I lost the final photoshop colored version of this one. Anecdotically it circulated via e-mail and was quite popular among the people in charge of ruling and procurement of uniforms. Especially the head of that department. I celebrate their humor!

A graphic story left aside

I found drawings I did around twenty five years ago. By that time I sketched my last story, then I was very interested in comics, but also I was beginning to study engineering so "something's gotta give" do you guess which one did?
I have been thinking ever since on give a try on comic drawing, but my art creativity suffered in benefit of the sciences.

Oil and Egg Tempera

My last work on last year's portrait painting course was a portrait of an actor. I wanted to learn how to use egg tempera, unfortunately I did not documented the sequence, but it was as follows:
1. Portrait drawing with charcoal.
2. Fix the charcoal with air spray.
3. Prepare the egg tempera. There are different methods, I use the easy one: mixing pigments (Sonnelier; burnt sienna and white) with the egg yolk (I used five eggs), I did not use any water on the mix (some recipes use distilled water, lineseed oil, etc.)
4. I applied the egg tempera to the background, then shadows and after lights. I had to work rapidly since the egg tempera dries very fast
5. The rest was oil painting, several sessions.
And the result is this:

Some try-outs on watercolor

Last year I was practicing watercolor painting, here now I present a little sample of my work with this technique:

I began with some invented scenes, and copying stuff from books

Later some sketches with live model (this one is the same of my second oil painting)

The house of a neighbor

A portrait of Andrew Wyeth from a photo I got from the Net

And finally, a small self portrait on Indian ink, watercolor, and some white to fix details.

Marcela, Oil and Alkyd paint

A new exercise on portrait painting using the technique of glazing, using alquidic paint, now I am using as model a photo of my wife Marcela I took during our honeymoon:

Step One: Charcoal drawing and fixing it with hairspray.

Step Two: Once the drawing is protected by the layer of hairspray give it a thin glaze with a mix of alkyd sap green and burnt sienna thinned with oil medium with a bit of alquidic medium.
Step Three: I begin to put color in it using only burnt sienna and white.

Step Four: I continue adding color, some green and blue to get in the mood, and then some glaze all over the painting with a mix of green and blue with oil and alkyd medium.

Step Five: I fix the size of the reflection which I had it wrong in the first step Continue adding painting to get more detail.
Step Six: I try to make the tones smoother and apply another transparent glaze.
Step Seven: I apply a local glaze on the reflection.

Step Eight: After another local glaze; the finished? Painting.

Even I am not fully satisfied with the painting I think it was a nice exercise. I still have to learn that what I have to do is exercises, not masterpieces, so sometimes among these exercises I might get something good.