I got a tiny pochade box -- a little portable oil painting kit -- for my birthday and have been painting 5" X 7" oil sketches of whatever happens to be in front of me. Here are few of them.
Plants on the Windowsill, 5X7 Oil on panel
Prospect Park, November 2011, 5x7 oil on canvas board. This was my first plein air oil painting. I felt really rushed while painting it, but sort of like how it came out...
Day After Thanksgiving, 5X7 oil on canvasboard
The Kitchen, 5X7 oil on panel
Here's a new one I did a few weeks ago. Click to enlarge.
Frans Hals on the iPad, oil on canvas
Here are some silly ones, painted, as you can guess, from imagination rather than life...
Click to see full size...
I just started painting on my wife's iPad. It's a surprisingly good experience and allows you to paint in a way that's similar in many way to traditional media, including mixing "wet paint" on the canvas. Anyway, here's my first quick portrait, of the actress Paulette Goddard.
Click to see full size...
These are from 2001 - 2002. I haven't seen them in years, but was just going through an old bag and found a notebook with a bunch of pen and ink stuff.
The note in the top right, which is a bit cut off in this so-so scan, reads, "This drawing was very nice. Then I had a couple of beers and ruined it with 'Neutral Gray' ink. San Francisco 6/1/2001. Hotel Boheme."
From the handwriting, it looks like it may have been more than a couple of beers... The "neutral gray ink" refers to the wash I clumsily dumped over the sweater, face and hair. Oh well. Sometimes the most important thing is knowing when to stop. Lesson learned.
I drew this in front of a full size mirror in my hotel room. I was in San Francisco on a business trip that included remarkably little business, so I bought some art supplies and hung out at this little hotel in North Beach, practiced my pen and ink and just sort of wandered the streets.
This one I did for practice, as you can see, as a copy of a New Yorker cartoon, so all copyright whatevers are duly what's-it-called. (I assume that last sentence is legally sufficient attribution.) I think this was the same week in San Francisco, but I'm not sure. I remember being pretty happy with this, but if you compare it to the real deal, its deficiencies are many...
This one I like best, I think. I drew this in 2002, apparently. It's a view of a corner of our old apartment on Stuyvesant street, in the East Village. I miss that place. Unlike the others, which were done with nib and/or brushes, this one I think was drawn with a Rapidograph.
I was going to paint a portrait of Tamson from life, but then I had an idea to paint it from a photo I had on my laptop. But instead of just using a photo on my computer as reference, the idea was to paint the entire desktop (windows, dialogs, etc.) and to paint all of that from life. I'm not at all sure if was a good idea, but It's basically done now and here's how it came out.
(Click on images to see a larger view.)
And here are a couple of photos of the work in progress. This first one shows the paints I mixed to create the bands of color in the dialog box. The one below shows it a step later and includes the whole setup, including the laptop I was painting.
Copyright Evan Simeone, 2010. All rights reserved.
Here are a few more paintings, including a couple recent oil portraits. But first, a few watercolor sketches from a little (5" X 8") notebook I take with me to paint when traveling:
After Raphael
Hands Study 1
Hands Study 2
Milo Meditating
Anton Checkhov
And here are a couple more oil paintings I did recently:
Sulla, oil on canvas, 16" X 20". This is a portrait of Sulla, the ancient Roman dictator (c. 138 BC - 78 BC). It was painted mostly from imagination based on a damaged ancient marble bust.
Edna, oil on canvas 17" X 22" -- Based on a photo of Edna St. Vincent Millay
Nikolai Gogol, oil on canvas 16" X 20" (after a portrait by F.A Moller, 1840)
And here's a new pic of my little self-portrait which has more accurate color, but now has an annoying glare...
Self Portrait, 6" X 9", oil on canvas board
Copyright Evan Simeone, 2010 -- all rights reserved
Here are some of the paintings I've made since I started a month ago. Beyond these I've also done a bunch of smaller studies and watercolor sketches which maybe I'll post later. Basically, I've spent nearly every waking moment painting (outside of work and time with my family) since mid August.
All of these pics are just snapshots taken in mediocre light. I'll have to take some better pics at some point. Some of these I'm happy with, some not, but I feel like I'm getting better at least. They are shown below in roughly chronological order, starting with the watercolors I did at first through the oil paintings I've done in the last week.
Click on any of them to see a larger version.
My first painting, the view from the back porch of my sister's house on Mouse Island. Watercolor on cold-pressed 140lb paper, about 8 X 10.
My second painting sitting on the chalkboard by the front door. This was based on some pic I found online. Wouldn't normally paint from somebody else's (probably copyrighted) photo, but was just looking for an exercise and wasn't expecting it to turn out OK.
Closer view of same painting. Again, lousy photo in poor light. Watercolor on cold-pressed 140lb paper, 12 X 18
My third painting, after a black and white public domain photo of Dostoyevsky. Watercolor on cold-pressed 140lb paper, 12 X 18.
A quick still life watercolor sketch on cold-pressed 140lb paper, about 8 X 10.
An unfinished sketch of the view from Latimer Point in Stonington, CT. Watercolor on cold-pressed 140lb paper,12 X 18.
The corner of my living room with two color charts in oil and the finished oil painting of Bulgakov I posted while still in progress last week. All three are on canvas board, I think 10 X 14.
(I've begun the long, careful process of creating color charts for every combination of two colors on my palette, each rendered in five shades from the pure color to nearly white, all done entirely with a palette knife. The idea is to both really learn how to mix colors and shades as well as become proficient with a platte knife. So far it seems to be working since the first few columns took forever, but I can now mix and paint a column correctly in about 10 - 15 minutes. The bottom chart is the first one, which has each color just by itself. The top is a warm red mixed with each other paint on my palette. Next I'll do a chart of my cooler red mixed with the other colors, and so on. I only have about 10 more of these charts to go...)
Self portrait hanging in another corner of the living room. Also an early unfinished oil sketch of a Rubick's cube and a roll of duck tape on 8 X 10 panel sitting on the bookshelf...
A closer, but not very good photo of my small self-portrait in oil. 6 X 9 canvas board.
Messy apartment, cluttered with painting junk. Just got this french easel with the idea of being able to paint at home, then fold it up. The painting on the easel is an almost finished portrait of Edna St. Vincent Millay after (and greatly extrapolated from) a tiny, pixelated black and white photo in the public domain... Oil on stretched canvas, 13 X 17 .
(All work copyright Evan Simeone, 2010. All rights reserved)
So my latest obsession is painting. I've been doing it for several hours a night for the last two or three weeks. I started with watercolor, which I had done a couple times before, and then last week I tried oils for the first time. With watercolors, I was sort of satisfied with my first few paintings because even though they had problems, they came out close to what I wanted; I understood the basic concepts behind watercolor techniques even if I wasn't at all practiced at them.
Of course painting in oils is totally different. I had no idea what I was doing. But I just kept practicing and now feel like I am starting (just barely) to have a bit of control. Anyway, here's my first mostly complete oil painting. (The bottom is unfinished because I don't have an easel and so needed somewhere that wasn't covered in wet paint so I could hold the canvas in my hand.)
"Bulgakov" Oil on Canvas - 9" X 12"
(Copyright Evan Simeone, 2010, all rights reserved)
The subject is Mikhail Bulgakov, the Russian novelist. I found a black and white photo of him on-line and was amused by the monocle, tuxedo and the absurd expression on his face. It certainly didn't come out as well as I wanted, but I guess my next one will be better...
The painting is still wet so I couldn't scan it. The image above is just a so-so snapshot. I'll scan and post some other recent paintings soon.
