Mary at a Wedding

Here's another attempt at my wife, Mary's portrait. The model was a photo of her taken on ther veranda at a lovely country club near Parkersburg, WV. I again tried to concentrate on the values and wound up having to work on gettting the colors right as well. Of course I continue to work at getting the resemblence and thought this was a better attempt then the one about a year ago. She seemed more pleased with this one than the one previous although she has little to say about it. I continue to work on the values with the acryllics and hopefully things will come together soon. I really want to try a landscape and my daughter, Anthea wants me to also but I find it so hard to pull myself away from the portraits. I don't know why. Oh well. Here's my work for August.

ACEY In Hat

Here is an acrylic portrait of my daughter Anthea. I used a photo taken last fall on out back deck as the model. I am learning to keep values and light consistent and this study provided a learning experience for me to do so.

Boiling Peppers

Here's a rendition using the medium of colored pencils of my wife Mary doing what she loves to do; cooking peppers. I reallly worked at trying to create realistic smoke. I need more work at doing this with the colored pencils as the blending is quite tricky.

Flower-girl's Kiss

Here's another value study of my two nices on my niece, Jen's wedding day. Again, I just consentrated on trying the keep the values in sinc. The hair turned into a rather difficulty and I often found myself overworking. Overall I thought it turned out better than I had thought although in some ways less well than I'd hoped. Oh well, maybe next time.

The weather has finally begun to be nice and I hope to get out and try a summer landscape soon.

Jen and Jon

Here's a value study of my lovely nice, Jen and her husband, Jonathon on their wedding day. I tried to forget avoid the stress of gaining a likeness and just concentrate on the values. Somehow this seemed to keep me from overworking the piece as I usually do and the overall work turned out a bit better than I had anticipated. Initially, I planned to do the flower in Jon's lapel with the wedding colors. Instead, I just stayed with the value of the graphite rather than making a last minute attempt to translate it to an color value. I suppose I lost my nerve . Oh, well as my dear friend, Kay says "Maybe next time".

Goldenrod Fields

Here's my rendition of my daugther in a field of goldenrods a few years ago. Using acrylics I attempted to work with light and experimenting with colors. I continued to fight with keeping the values thoughtout and of course to maintain the likeness. Also, I tried to do a dark underpainting and bring up the highlights. Although, it was far from what I wanted it was a great learning experience and quite fun.

"Sister's Dance"

Last December my wife and I attended a wedding of our friend's daugher, Anna. Anna has two sisters with whom she is very close. I was fortunate to snap a photo of Anna and her sister having fun after all the formal dancing was done. I liked the photo of so much that I wanted to try a graphite rendering. Although, I wasn't really satisfied with the result the girl's mother seemed to really like it when I gave it to her. I learned much as I do with each new project.