Yay Tablet!

I've been continuing to play with my new drawing tablet and re-learning the intricacies of photoshop. Here's what I've come up with so far.

Progress

Here are pictures of my in-class figure painting, in chronological order. So, you can see the development. Still two more weeks on this one.

Toy

New pen and ink drawing or did I just get an early Christmas drawing tablet?

And Through Struggle Come Small Pieces of Honesty

oil on wood
10" x 14"

oil on canvas scrap
5" x 7"- ish

oil on canvas scrap
4" x 7"-ish

After struggling with my self portrait for a few hours, I spit out another series of small landscapes. Having worked on such a large scale, there is something cathartic about scaling down and simplifying. These works again have a much more developed color palette than the self portrait.

Self Portrait in Progress

Each painting class I've taken has required a self portrait. I both love and hate them. I find them one of the most challenging because we are most critical of ourselves. So the portraits serve mangled, conflicting purposes; capturing the most idealized perception of myself, glaring self criticism, and reality.

Okay, Maybe Food Too

On Sunday I made Great Grandma Freda's rye bread and lentil soup. Both were fabulous.

For the soup I roasted a head of garlic in the oven, while starting my soup. When the garlic was done, I mashed up the cloves into a paste and dissolved them into the soup for roasted garlic-y goodness.

Figure

We've started a 5-6 week long figure painting. My teacher had us layout the scene as we liked. He gave us complete control, and of course, we didn't know what the hell to do with it. It took us the better part of 45 min. to set it up, until, finally our teacher came back and got us heading in the right direction. So, yes that is a skull in the lower right hand corner of the painting, that the figure is somewhat glancing down to.

This was taken after the first three and a half our session. I've scaled up the drawing and laid down some initial colors. I worked on it last week, though forgot to take a picture, so of course it no longer looks anything like this, as the figure changes slightly form week to week. On Wednesday I should have two pictures, and you'll be completely up to date on the piece.