The Blues

I have had a few people ask me lately if I have put the figurative work on hold.

The answer is no but it has been a bit derailed by technical issues regarding the supports that I like to work on. As you may know, I love working on panels, specifically the birch panels lately. But they are expensive and even though a crappy painting can be sanded down and the panel can be reused, I prefer NOT to do that if at all possible. And certainly since I am heading off into a new direction here, the odds of dog crap paintings are pretty high. So I decided to use gessoed paper. I used cold press 150lb. watercolor paper at first, but after doing a few smaller paintings, I decided that the cold press surface was really distracting to me. So I ordered new paper, hot press, 300lb watercolor, and then also decided to work larger, so the prep for the large pieces of paper have been keeping me busy lately, along with the small landscape paintings that I have been working on at the same time, and then I had to paint some frames as well. Can I add here again how great it is to have a large flat table to work on? It is awesome to have so much room for these various projects.

Anyway, throughout all of these distractions I have been thinking about how to approach the portraits and the figures, so it's not like I am not not doing anything. It's just that there hasn't been much to show. Heh.

But yesterday I did manage to squeak out an underpainting (ironically it's on one of the first paper surfaces that distracted me so much, coulda been doing these all this time I guess) and at the risk of jinxing the whole dang project I am putting it up here. I am very happy with it but I also fully expect that I will completely wreck it at the next stage. I have been painting glazes over bright red/orange for so long that doing them over ultramarine will surely cause havoc with all my color sensibilities, not to mention possibly making my head explode too.

At least this jpeg will prove that things started out ok, though, right?