Did a little more work on this one,

And started a new one..

Roman

Over-Refining

Spent all day yesterday refining this thing to what you see in the top image. I was amazed at the level of blending and subtlety I was able to achieve - that's definitely new! But at the same time it lost some of the raw powerful qualities it had before. It was more painterly - you could see the struggle to pull form and personality out of the chaos. A bit too much scribbling, which is still a holdover from my pencil drawing heritage - I need to get used to using bigger brushes. But I think I'm going to go back to the previous version and try to develop it by blending only where it's needed, and keep much of the looseness and the rough qualities.

The more refined one looks harder - it's more about surface and slick technique, while the earlier one is about the interplay between control and chaos, the formal elements of painting, and the struggle to pull a personality out of the paint. There's a lot more humanity and artistry in the earlier one, and that's what I'm after.

But I do think it's good to be able to do that, and I should definitely keep doing it now and then just as an exercise in control. I need to be able to freely move back and forth between both modes.

Stages of development

Back to it

The Blending is the thing - notes on previous painting

I think the important aspect of how I painted this one is the blending. I made sure to blend down the colors, the brush strokes, and the values by creating in-between mixes (laying one transparently over the one next to it) and then blending using carefully graduated levels of transparency. Of course the method of making the greyscale version first using the Threshold filter was also immensely helpful, especially with this particular picture, because of the very strong lighting - it's an overall fairly dark image with some very strong glaring highlights. Also, I'm going through the same transition I did with my drawing in the 80's - in the beginning I was using darks mids and lights but they were disconnected, and as I went forward I learned to integrate them into a more holistic illusion of form.

Last painting for 2015

Lol I can't understand his abs at all - I could try to paint abs off another picture - maybe I will at some point, but I'm happy enough with this to call it done and move on.

Here's an older painting I did of the same guy. His name is Wanderlei Silva (pronounced Vanderlay):

Happy New Year!!