Exits from Heidelberg

Din A4 Wood Panel, Oil

Life Figure Session BBK Mannheim, Nov 26

Din A4 Wood Panels, Oil, 7 min Poses, with Chair: 15 min

Watercolor Experiment

38 cm x 29 cm, Watercolor

My first watercolor painting since i was a kid. Just wanted to know how it feels. Fun. Back to the oils!

Skeleton with Muscles, Backside

Din A3 Wood Panel, Oil

Humphrey

15 cm x 20 cm, Oil

I had another two quick approaches to faces with desasterous outcome, even worse than before. Probably too much speed work recently. I felt I needed to slow down and did this one in about 3h.

Palette Knife Study

20 cm x 15 cm, Oil

This is my first painting done without brushes. Will take many to get used and a shorter knife for such small formats.

Design Proposal, Male

In case you found the last ones bad... how do you call this? I worked 27 mins at it before giving up. Well, after this little project i will certainly have a usefull set of references on where my drawing stands.

20 Minute Faces 3 & 4

15 cm x 20 cm, Oil

For posting the photos on blogger i need to upload them on the picasa web album. There i was asked "who is this?". The software recognized these to be faces of a human beings! 
Great, i can't be that far off then ;-) Celebrate your successes!

20 Minute Faces 1 & 2

There are two more life sessions left next week to gather some studies for the exhibition on Dec 3rd. I did plenty of figures in the last two weeks and think it did help me to improve on this somewhat. However, I decided to stop the home figure training from photos for now. I feel a bit tired of it and that's my signal. Like with anything we do or learn, progress is fast at the beginning but tends to slow down after a while. So in terms of overall improvement it is better to frequently find a new (yet related) thing to improve on. A new challenge bringing the fun back.

I think i will give time-limited face studies a try. I am not sure whether that's the best way to move forward, but it sounds like great fun. I have great respect for portraiture painting, therefore I avoid to call these portraits. They may look like it, but i have also no intention to create caricatures/ political cartoons (laughter welcome anyway). Just want to learn painting more accurately (yet loose therefore time-limited) to capture faces with better resemblance.

20 cm x 15 cm, Oil, 20 min time-limited

No Madam... well, i agree that resemblance isn't great but not that he looks so much better in real!

Croquis Café, Week 132

40 cm x 40 cm, 4B Pencil

Some time has passed since August 28th, when I posted some drawings using the Croqius Cafe Videos. Since then I did around 100 of those, just over one per day on average. Thought I'd post an update of how they look in the meantime.

Life Figure Session Waldhofstrasse, Nov 20

 

Din A4 Wood Panels (29.7 cm x 21 cm), Oil

20 min Poses except for the fourth: 7 min. The bottom one reminds of an aspect of figure studies not negligible: Proportions ;-)

Inner Circuit

Use much paint!

15 cm x 15 cm Wood Panel, Oil

Scrimper, more paint!

15 cm x 15 cm Wood Panel, Oil

It's blog anniverary... 500 posts.... Use more paint for the next 500!

240 with Reward

Din A4 Wood Panel, Oil

Life Figure Session BBK Mannheim, Nov 19

 

 

Din A4 Wood Panels, Oil, 15 min Poses

Blockstudies 236 - 239

Fear Paradox, Artrage Concept Study

Life Figure Session, Waldhofstrasse, Nov 13

       

Din A4 Wood Panels, Oil. upper two: 15 min   lower row: 10 min

I was fairly happy with my work that night, thinking: "Yes! This is two notches up compared to yesterday." Shortly after i did not see those two real steps downward...

Tango, two notches down, back to sea level. 

All square for the day!

Diagnostic Graphitology from Nov 14

Twisted Ankle

Had a small accident yesterday. Nothing really serious but i can't walk for a couple of days and need to wear a foot splint for six weeks. Guess i will be back to painting soon, i do worry about my progress in Tango though ;-)
Thanks for all the good wishes received!

Life Figure Session, BBK Mannheim, Nov 12

Uncommonly, we started with a long pose and went shorter. I was not getting into the light key at the beginning, i.e finding the right colors for the light and shadow sides. It got better towards the end. The 8 min study is the only i am satified with. Next figure session is tomorrow evening.

Obedient to a Point

Work in a timely manner but not against the clock today so you are fresh tomorrow for the life session and

USE MORE PAINT!

Din A4 Wood Panel, Oil

Master, isn't that there my best one yet?

Didn't I say timely manner?

In that time one could have painted The Last Supper!

USE THE LIMITED PALETTE OF ANDERS ZORN!

Zorns Palette was Black, White, Ochre and Vermillion. 

Vermillion no have so I will use cad red, if that is okay Sir.

 

Din A4 Wood Panel, Oil

Wow Master! 

Please come and see how my tinted black appears as blue!

Did I teach you that the brush is held like a pen???

Oh Boy, would you like to start all over with blockstudies again?

PAINT A MAN!

Day's Half Cycle

Sleeping

Din A4 Wood Panel, Oil, aimed for 20 min, needed 21

Dressing

Din A4 Wood Panel, Oil, aimed for 20 min, needed 22

Sitting

Din A4 Wood Panel, Oil, aimed for 20 min, needed 26

All done from Photos. Think it is okay to give myself a little more time here than I will have for most poses of the life sessions (Wednesdays, probably Thursday too). A runner trains at aimed race pace only occasionally.

No-Brainer

Din A4 Wood Panel, Oil

Hi Jörg, 
No i don't need you as phone joker, thanks... This million euro question is ridiculous.
Just call to ask when i can pay you a visit. I'd like to get an update on science and gossip!
Ciao.

Stefan Hell, Physicist, Nobel Prize Chemistry 2014

Good News and a Bummer

With this painting from October 10th I have been taken part at the Monthly Contest of Daily Paintworks (DPW) and it was picked amongst the top 15! 
I feel honoured, especially after looking at many of the other 94 entries:  
DPW October Contest Results

Big Thank You to the Jury and the Marine Family for running DPW so well!

No dad, I won no money and still can't buy you a Porsche. But i did win a month of being featured artist at DPW. For one month the new paintings I put up for sale will appear far on top of the DPW website (DPW gets some 30000 visits from 11000 visitors per day on average). 

Here is the bummer: On this Sunday morning I wanted to shock the US by placing my yesterday's nude night crawler right next to a beauty- and peaceful still life of Carol Marine. 
Now guess what! She has not put up a painting today. Guess I am simply unlucky...

Caught in Homologous States

A3 (42 cm x 29.7 cm) Wood Panel, Oil

Evidence of Clothes

Din A4 Wood Panel, Oil, 27 min

I have received some questions I'd like to answer here. Thanks a lot for your feedback!

Tell us more about your competition on December 3rd

The event on December 3rd is not a competition but an exhibition with other artists, where drawings/paintings of life figure sessions will be presented. I am glad about that ... I hate to loose!

What is the BBK Mannheim?

The BBK Mannheim is a local art institution. Lots of good stuff going on there, i just take part at the life figure sessions at the moment.

I think of going to a life figure drawing class myself and would like to know more 

Every life session is different, depending on the organizer, model, preferences of the participants and length of the session.

A typical session of 2 hours plus 15 min break could look like this:

5 poses of 1 min, 3 poses of 2 min, 2 poses of 5 min, 2 poses of 10 min

break

1 pose of 15 min, 2 poses of 20 min

Those do not add up to 2 hours because it also takes time to find a pose and let the model stretch and recover after the longer poses. 

What pose duration are you actually aiming at with your time limited figure studies?

From perspective of oil painting the longer poses are more interesting but i will probably try to use oils throughout and draw the faster gestures with brush and one color for warmup.

With my training from photos I aim at the poses of 10 mins and beyond. I have just figured out that for "home figure training" setting a strict time limit does not make much sense as it leads to frequent failure and frustration. A good training form should rarely lead to frustration. So instead, I do set a time goal for most studies (20 min for the one above), but i do not drop my brush when this time is up (which I would do in a time-limited study) but continue until major errors are fixed and the result is acceptable somewhat. I record and post the overall time needed (27 mins for the one above). It takes many years of work to become good at figure painting. So all i can hope for is to become a little better at it in the next three weeks. Anyway, I think one will see the before/after difference, due to my low level of experience and skill in this area. The project fits ideally into the season and forces me to work fast. Outside the plein air season there is always the danger of slowing down too much with still lives, master copies and own larger paintings.