Portrait workshop with PJ Lynch..

Yesterday I was lucky enought to attend a portrait workshop at the Kennedy Art shop in Dublin. It was given by artist / illustrator PJ Lynch who has been illustraing children's books since 1984. He is an excellent tutor also as I discovered on the day. PJ helped simplify many of the problems I was encountering with my approach giving me tips on color and form where I had erred. Often he would step in front of my easel and while explaining, politely make the correct adjustments with his own brush. Avery expedient method of correction I must say. 

To get to the workshop I took the early train from Cork with my friend Eva Widermann another illustrator with phenomenon talent, both of us carrying easels, paints and scribble books in hand. Traveling with my art gear is one of my favorite things. The ability to set up fast and carry wet canvas back to the studio for later work is always a great advantage. One of the things I like so much on train journeys is of course scribbling and yesterday was no different. Either out of the imagination or from the landscape going by, it's always fun to get ideas down in this way, the vibrations of the train adding significantly to the fast scribbles. When drawing the landscape from the train, what you see is only visible for a moment so you have to stay focused and scribble as fast as possible. It's an activity that eats up the time of any rail trip.

Of course you can just draw out of the imagination also. Sometimes I get lucky and pull a usefull design out of all these extra fast drawings that even ends up as a landscape painting. Anyway the day went quite well, as well as being an excellent tutor PJ is a complete gentleman and it was easy to be comfortable and learn in his presence. Here's the work I brought away on the day.

 oil on canvas board 30 x 25

 I will leave it for the moment until it tacks up a bit, in a while I will follow PJ's advice and run a glaze over the shadow areas of the work. I would highly recommend this demo if any of you reading this get the opportunity it is well worth the effort.

Thanks for looking :)

Portrait under strong light,

Charcoal and colored chalk 30 x 24 cm

The other evening while the web cam was on I leaned in toward the computer screen.

At the same time I had the fluorescent light I use at the desk for sketching switched on. 

The lamps I use are old salvaged medical spotlights similar to the lights you would find in a dental surgery. Very bright.The dark light contrast I saw in the cam display was far too tempting not to draw so I completed this little work with dry pastels based on it. While I'm not too sure about the likeness as a self portrait, not being quite as lean faced as the work appears, I still felt happy enough to post it.

Thanks for looking :)

Study of a Velazquez self portrait in ballpoint pen, sandpaper & Bleach

Ballpoint pen, sandpaper & bleach on recycled card  30 x 20cm

Here is a study from a self portrait by Velazquez. For this piece I first scribbled

out the main portrait with my ink pen, I then sanded the whole piece with a medium grade

emery cloth and used a hard eraser to knock back the lighter tones. After some adjustments

with the pen I then proceded to brush with household bleach the areas where I wanted to get 

the highlights. It's a messy approach but I thought it would be worth a try and for the materials

I used it seemed to come out ok. The whole work is done on a piece of recycled white card used
for packaging which I found much easier to sand than the normal A4 cartridge sheets I use from
time to time. Of course this is not the first piece of artwork I have created from mediums which
are all  destined to become rubbish :)

Thanks for looking :)

Study of a Rembrandt self portrait in oils

oil on canvas 46 x 36 cm

Almost at the end of the art challenge now with the art group "The Galway Pub Scrawl"

Todays theme was "master copy" and so I had the audacity to try my hand at a facisimile

of a Rembrandt self portrait...

Thanks for looking :)

Oil study of detail from a Guido Reni.

oil on oilboard 34 x 18 cm

This is a study of the face of Deineara from a Guido Reni
Oil on oilboard 6 x 4 inches. This started as an exercise that I wasn't
really taking seriously. I had a very small canvas and just figured I'd scribble a bit and
very quickly I became caught up in the work. Its easy of course when you have a picture of the original work by Reni to study from, so I can't actually take any credit for this. However it was alla prima and I was surprised to get some resemblance of the original without going to any great lengths. Mostly I used raw umber, burnt sienna and cadmium yellow. A very slight touch of rose madder to heighten the reds.

Thanks for looking :)