Into 2018

Portrait study   Neymar

Portrait study Ridley Scott

Happy new year.  

Took a break over the festive season hence the lack of posting here.  I had hoped to keep posting but it was not to be.  I have been busy working on other art related activities which I will share in the coming weeks.  In the meantime here are some portrait studies.  The Neymar one is a still from a beats advert.  The Scott one is from a Guardian interview about his new film.  

Snowy Siege

Snowy Siege 

With Christmas holidays coming I have one snowy themed image. The other one is a  study from a photo.  

Study of  MELVYN GOLDSTEIN / National Geographic Creative

Beneath the Waves

Frame 1

 This week was all about the Artstation challenge beneath the waves.  I sat on the fence about jumping into this one and to be honest I left it  too late to give it a good go.  However I did pull together the requisite 4 images for the keyframe challenge.  If nothing else it was a good exercise in crunching a lot of work into about 5 days.  

Frame 2

Frame 3 

Frame 4

Thumbnails

Ant -Spider

Ant -Spider

The first 2 sketches in ink were following along with Bjorn Hurris stream on Twitch.  He streams early in the morning so its a good way for me to stay punctual with my day.  Besides that they are very informative.  The spider one I decided to work on in Photoshop just to play around.  

Troll -Dinosaur

The portrait is practice using a reference from  Grigoriy Peppo on Twitch.  He usually works traditionally but this one he also did digitally.  He has a lot of knowledge around traditional media and portraiture with a bit of philosophy thrown in and always entertaining.

Portrait study 33

 The others are just random figure sketches to practice poses.  

Sketches 38

Sketches 39

A little late -Steppes

Steppes 

 A bit late getting this post out this week.  I did want to finish the piece above so I delayed posting until I had got it to a point close to done.  A portrait study - trying to get likeness.  I have posted a few sketches of folks in different poses.  I have been doing these everyday.  I am doing them in pencil also.  With the oil painting I held off on the portraits until I got some zinc white - which I got today. I did push ahead with the wolf study.  I will do another pass to push the darks and lights and put in the tree.  

Portrait study 33

After Alfred_Wierusz-Kowalski_-_Samotny_wilk

Sketches 36

Sketches 37 

Revisiting

Revisited

 This is a reworking of a piece I did a while ago.  I wanted to go back and see if I could push it further. 

Still working on the oil techniques.  I changed it up and went to copy a work by Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski.  I also tried another Rubens.  This one definitely got away from me but I will keep working on it to see if I can get a better likeness.   

After  Alfred_Wierusz-Kowalski_-_Samotny_wilk

After Alfred_Wierusz-Kowalski_-_Samotny_wilk

Rubens_Pieter_Paul_-_Infanta's_Waiting-maid_in_Brussels

The messenger

After Rubens 

So got a first pass completed on the old gal.  The plan to complete these by doing successive layers was somewhat abandoned.  I didn't have any zinc white to hand only titanium white which is too opaque for glazing.  I also figured out I was not going to make it to the anything like the finish of the original progressing with glazes without the white so I compromised.  Regardless the grey layer really helped and after the colours were mixed the painting too no time at all.  
I got a second pass on bearded guy and here the glazing did help pick up the hue.  
I think it would take quite alot of playing around and adjusting to get a good process down. I have a few more panels prepped so I can continue .
  The last image is a copy of ALFRED VON WIERUSZ-KOWALSKI   the messenger.  Did this study because I liked the massing of dark and light.  

After Rubens 

 After ALFRED VON WIERUSZ-KOWALSKI  The Messenger