My Painting Final! And day 8

More apologies for not posting every day, a combination of finals (All 2 of them. One of them was painting. Time management fail), laziness and probably something else (Borg invasion?) has kept me from posting.

Before we get into 'Day 8: What are 3 passions you have?', I'd like to share with you the culmination of my one semester of oil painting. I'll probably show you my other favorite painting too. And maybe another one. Or two.

Shut up. I loved painting. And this is my blog (well, I guess Jes and I have joint custody. It's a complicated arrangement, weekends only, pending my ability to hold down a steady job).

In another blog post I'll show the step-by-step of my final, because I think it's interesting, and shut up, see the above paragraph if you don't want to see it.

A couple of things to keep in mind as I show this: 1) I've never painted using an implement that was not my finger, 2) I've NEVER art-ed someone's face before, 3) I'm still very much in the process of learning how to not make oil paint look like butts.

So here's my grisaille. Grisaille is Italian for 'Only use black and white and be incapable of mixing those colors into the gray that you want".

About 1 1/2' x 2'

It was (obviously) based on a bust that I was looking at, and it was pretty fun to do. I actually had it exactly the way I wanted, and asked my teacher Jean what she thought. She told me to add another layer of paint. In theory that doesn't sound that hard, just add the same colors over top of what you already have.

The trouble, however, stems from the very nature of paint mixing. It's hard. Well not physically, obviously, it's just little blobs of color, although my wrist did get kinda tired sometimes. I was just incapable of creating the same grays, so as I started to cover the parts that needed more paint, they were VERY obviously not the same hue (temperature was the word used by Jean, although that's just asinine, because as a science minded individual I constantly wanted to tell her that they were both, in fact, room temperature). So I basically had to redo the entire painting and I wasn't nearly as pleased with the end result.

That said, I still think it looks pretty good.

Up next is actually my favorite, it was for the patterns and layers assignment, and I think it turned out really well. The colors look a little muted in the picture, so it looks a little more impressive in real life, but I still really like it.

About 1' x'

The simplicity and clean nature of it just made me really happy. It was at this point that many people (including Jean) told me I should go into graphic design. Which was both cool because it was accompanied with praise, but at the same time it was like "Hey interesting painting, you should go do graphic design." 

That's a little like saying "You made a decent steak, you'd be a great rancher".

And while, yeah, I'd probably be a great rancher, that doesn't say much for my steak. 

Mmmm, steak.

It was also my lowest grade out of all the painting assignments I did, which is funny because I feel like it's easily my best piece. Not the most complicated, or even difficult, but definitely the best executed. 

Anyways, our final project was a self portrait, so I decided to co-opt Vault Boy from the Fallout series with a few changes to make it more like me.

It's about 2' x 3'

It's not quite done (I need to add some black lines to the tie, shirt collar, his face, etc) but I thought I'd show you what I have so far. I used quite a bit of linseed oil, so it's take forever to dry, so I haven't been able to finish it yet. I spent like 13 hours straight one day on it, and another 5 or so the next (that last day may or may not have been the day it was supposed to be presented...), so I kinda painted myself out for a little bit.

Anyways, hope you liked those. I sure enjoyed making them.

Onto day 8!

What are 3 passions you have?

1) Well, obviously I've picked up a little bit of a painting bug, so once my back stops hurting from being hunched over a table to paint a much-too-large striped suit, I'm sure I'll get back into that.

2) Golf. I freaking love golf, and I'm only marginally terrible at it (unlike most of my other hobbies, where I'm decidedly terrible at them). Being up on the Waterton Lakes Golf Course is basically my constant 'something' in the "Man I wish I could be doing something else".

3) Space. If my post about how space is the coolest thing ever, and NASA should have a budget much larger than it currently does didn't tip you off, I love, love, love, LOVE space. The coolest thing I've seen recently is this video from the International Space Station. Seriously. Click that link if you haven't seen it.

CLICK IT NOW.

You're welcome.