Portraiture by Edward Hopper

Here is a great portrait by Edward Hopper. It is an interesting pose that he chose to paint his wife. He probably painted her in on the spot (plein air).

He painted her as she painted.

Amazing how he makes it look simple.

Aidan

This project has been a challenge in that it has been my first attempt at a portrait in a long time.

I like the finished product (almost finished) but I continue to like the earlier stage above. Something about the unfinished quality is interesting. I need to play with this in future paintings.

Well, this was a good first try, but it is over worked and my transitions are a bit abrupt. The contrast is good. I did smooth out the gradient on his arm, which you can see in the two close-up photos.

Painting or drawing a likeness is one of the hardest things that I have done. This came out very close to what Aidan looks like, which is promising.

Aidan has a rather heroic pose going on here and I am glad I could capture it. He has been watching me do the painting and he seems pleased. He asked me how much I was going to sell it for and I told him that it would probably not go up for sale.

Three paintings

Today is Sunday and I completed the under painting on the left.

Now I have three painting starts.
I have a bit of a cold or something and the associated aches and pains are keeping me from painting more today.

I have had two breaks during this mornings session, which is how many I should take anyway.

Painting Aidan

I needed a break from all the urban/industrial scenes so I am finally trying some paintings of people.
In this case, I started a painting of my son at the beach. While I still used a grid to help with the under painting, I did not need to do any additional layout lines. I just went right to laying down paint to sketch out the scene. This was very relaxing and very satisfying.
This image of Aidan at the beach was one of the rare moments that I was able to get him to pose, but not pose for a photo, if that makes any sense.
The composition is good with the opportunity to create color fields with the background elements. The light and shadow contrast is very good. September light is my favorite for it's long shadows and warm glow.
The canvas is 16" x 32", for which I made the stretcher of old wood from the Rebuilding Center. I will be starting another painting of this size as well, which will be of my wife and kids on their way to school.

New Camera Is Sweet

I have been playing with this new camera. It is pretty nice for the cost. It is at least twice as powerful as the old camera, which I have been bitching about for years, and has a built-in rechargeable battery. It does not "curve" the edges of my paintings when I shoot them, which is great.

Now I need to find an affordable way to get better studio lighting that will reduce glare. I used some old t-shirts to cover the lights for this photo, which helps, but reduces the light quite a bit.

The battery life seems to be quite long and is designed to be able to recharge through the USB cord, so I can both charge and download images.

This camera takes nice movies as well, which will be fun to play with as well.

Maybe some film clips to add to the blog?

This 4' x 4' painting of the waterfront, "Beneath the Broadway Bridge" is still for sale, by the way.

New Easel

I have been wanting to make an easel that can handle large paintings.

For a few bucks, at the Rebuilding Center, I was able to fabricate this thing.

Now, I was hoping to build in more adjustable parts, but I could not get everything to work.

The lower shelf has wooden brackets that connect to the main verticals (2x4's). These brackets were supposed to have holes drilled in them which were going to correspond to holes in the verticals, but that was easier said than done. For now, the shelf is "pinned" to the vertical members with screws. On a large painting, it is unlikely that I will be wanting to move it up and down much. It only takes a few minutes to reset the screws anyway.

If this works out, maybe I will build a more refined easel for this purpose.

In any case, I can now make paintings up to 80" tall if I want.

The photo was taken with my new camera, a Nikon Coolpix S3100. I sold a painting and invested a little in this new camera and am already enjoying the quality of the photos.

New York Bridge

This project has been a challenge. It has taken me longer to complete this due to summer vacations, day job and being lazy.

I am finally finished with the Manhattan bridge painting and am looking forward to getting it out of the house.

This detail from the painting shows a yellow school bus, which turned out to be one of my favorite parts of the painting.

Here is a detail of the bridge.

I painted the vertical cables last using a straight edge. I don't usually use a straight edge while I am painting, but since these needed to be relatively straight and I no longer had the under painting to depend on, I opted to paint the lines on top. I also went back in and added back in lines to accentuate the edges against the blue sky.

There is quite a bit going on in this painting and I have learned some things about doing street scenes.

The amount of layout required to get the perspective right was a bit overwhelming and I stressed about keeping things right.

I was pulling my hair out with the bicyclist and realized that I had the rear wheel too high, which made it look very odd. A quick repainting of this area did the trick.