a couple of studies from life
 

A couple of oil studies done from life (open studios). Both are done mostly with home made paints -- I have painted on and off with oils before but never really liked them much, until I started to experiment grinding my own paints & additives which make it a lot less frustrating (and thanks to the forum for a lot of useful information).

Still, I dont get it yet, which is why these studies are mostly using limited color, focusing on brush marks/handling mostly now. Color-mixing is too distracting for now.

Any feedback at all is welcome. If you can bother to spend some time with any criticism, that is doubly welcome.

Also, I hope this is the right place to post this (this forum is a labyrinth to navigate and nearly as dead as the Cretan one though hopefully not as deadly :-).

You did a good job.

I like the drawing in the first painting and the colors of the second one.

Mighty fine! And a treat to look at, Ramesh.

Re/color, it's a grey world out there! You can't go wrong with limited color, and concentrating on warm/cool relationships. Brilliant color is like cayenne pepper . . . the right amount in the right place is a wonderful tasteful seasoning, most enjoyable, but too much on everything is painful!

The painting of the girl is delightful for the warm/cool contrasts. Consider painting across forms (the arms) to develop a better feeling of solidity.

Yes, this forum is in the doldrums . . . too bad, those who have opted out are missing a treat, seeing your sketches.

Thank you, Richard & Claudemir, for your comments.

I will look out for modeling the forms a little better (the arms on that second painting are definitely sloppy -- I tend to lose concentration around the 2 hour mark though it is slowly getting better with practice).

Try using a mirror every 30 minutes to check for accuracy. Da Vinci was the one who first wrote about this technique.

You're right again!

Here are a couple more, the incomplete one is after 3 hours into a two session open studio. The other one is 2.5 hours. Both were painted directly without an underdrawing or painting. I was having too much trouble with layering of brushstrokes where they blend and muddy up unexpectedly, so decided to try to paint cleanly and directly. It was a bit tiring to evaluate each brush stroke (ended up sacrificing edge quality and variety)..

I might have to try to use some kind of a wax medium to help with the layering a bit (or maybe use egg on the top layer). This might allow me more control.. or maybe it is just that I need to get more experience to figure out how to load brushes so that wet layering is more well behaved.

Oh, my! Thank you so much for sharing!

These are all just gorgeous, just as they are. Lovely work.

Thanks, Chris!

The compressed blurry photos (am too lazy to spend time on photographing studies) nicely hide away the lack of variety in brush strokes and edges which makes the surface somewhat boring and too much like an illustration.

Here is an earlier oil study where I find my brushwork more interesting (but it was mostly a study in edge/color/value contrasts) which had some wet-in-wet layering that sometimes worked...

I will post newer work in separate threads as seems the convention here.