Mugshot 75, Scott with Clown nose

This one was fun to do, the straight gaze.   I photographed the live Scott in my studio with lights so I could control the amount of shadow on his face. Control is good, I want more of it. Still, I spent a long time messing with the drawing, the part of it that I always think I will speed through and then get to the painting part, the fun part.  Also regarding background, I  started with a viridian/winsor red base from which I mixed all the skin tones, then used a grey with predominantly viridian in it - trying for some overall color integrity.  I mean, I don't know how you get there....I'm just taking a whack at different ways to do it.

I uncrossed his left eye and re-shot this so am re-posting.

Paco and Cookbooks

This is the resident (very vocal)  cat at the home I visited over Thanksgiving.  Many surfaces to address, glassiness, hard planes, soft fur, etc.

Greyhound and Squirrel

Since I have always had small jittery terrier type dogs, greyhounds seem like ghost dogs, or maybe (not to imply death) angel dogs.  Vogue dogs, maybe. They look elegant and tranquil, although this dog had a lot of puppy still in him and wanted everything on the dinner table. Such sweetness in their faces. They don't look like they could cuddle up with you on a bad day, though. How would you fold up all those legs?

Belle and Student Work: Cherry Pie

Upper painting - Belle, an English bulldog I think. I tried this painting twice, the first time mostly grays and yellows and it didn't feel right, it wasn't light hearted enough. This was not because of color, who knows why, I'm sure Wayne Thiebaud could do it.  Also I have been looking at other peoples' backgrounds.... as usual, it is another world all to itself. I lifted a lot of paintings out of Catherine Kehoe's Powers of Observation site and made them as large as possible on the screen of my Mac, so every time I sit down at the computer, there are ten of them to look at with various background treatments.  Bielen's backgrounds are the most stunning -- both there and not there. How to make the background the perfect surround for the image, integral to the  painting of the dog/baby/sugar bowl? How not to see the back ground as separate -- In this case, there was so much baby pink in the dog's muzzle, I had to go for the quinacridone rose, and then the cadmium red light was not far behind.

Lower painting - a student's work. I think it's so nice, good color and positively iconographic.