“Quizzical,” and various other updates

I’ve agonized over this painting long enough, so even though I believe it’s not “quite yet” done, I am calling it DONE! I can’t take it anymore! This painting is more like abandoned, rather than completed.

This is just a study, slightly larger than what I usually do these days (which are mostly little daily paintings of 8×10″ and smaller). While 12×16″ is far from large, it seems “big” to me!

So, back to “Quizzical,” the subject of today’s post. It has no deep meaning, other than I wanted to do a study of shapes, colors, textures, as well as color temperature. I also liked the model’s expression in this one. The neck and shoulder area fascinated me. When I studied artistic anatomy in art school, the shoulders and neck were my favorite area. So much complexity there. So much that shifts around, moves, adjusts. I don’t think I did it justice in this painting, as I still see many flaws, but I’ll keep trying.

In addition, the colors in the flesh were sublime in the model. Warm and cool (a recurrent thing for all paintings, I feel), neutrals, soft pinks and lavenders, and some greens as well.

I have a student now (this is a first for me, a real live student!), and she’s asking me to help her with color temperature (the aforementioned “warm and cool”). I was showing her this painting and describing in rapturous detail the “beautiful” lavenders in the neck, and the “gorgeous” blues in the shoulders… and realized how much I love all of it.

There’s just so much to learn, and I feel I’m just starting on the journey. I guess that’s how it’ll always be.

P.S. To anyone who is curious about the new layout of this blog, it was done in response to “Mobilegeddon,” a recent Google search engine update which ranks sites higher if they display well in mobile devices. My old blog layout did not rate so well, so I transitioned over to this new layout in hopes of pleasing our Google overlords. Which I’m not sure I like this layout as well, but if it looks better on mobile phones, then I guess it’s the price that must be paid!