J Dunster Art Blog – Oil Painting, Portraits, and Cats
Figurative art, oil & acrylic painting, figure drawing, and cat portraits
An interesting little story behind this painting.
I had a simultaneously fun, exhausting, and crazy evening (and night, and morning!) at the studio yesterday. I was visiting with a fellow artist, we were yakking about art, doing some painting, just having fun, and some circumstances were created which made it necessary for us to both stay overnight at the studio. (It’s a long story. Continue reading “THE HEAD”
Here are two “new” paintings that are actually old paintings that I finally decided to finish up and post online!
I liked this very simple cat portrait—just the silhouette, with a little light touching the sides of the body, and the tip of the tail. It’s that tip of the tail that really catches my eye. I fussed with this painting off and on, and finally decided that simple was best, put a fork in it, it is done!
This second painting is a portrait of fellow artist Pavina. She sometimes models for our art / drawing groups, and during some of these modeling sessions I took a series of photos of her. This little oil sketch uses one of these photos. Continue reading “Cat in Silhouette & Pink Ribbon”
I started this painting several months ago. I kept on picking at it and picking at it, then put it away. Finally I decided to finish it, once and for all!
Rose is a model for one of the local drawing groups I attend. Continue reading “Rose of Iceland”
Another exploration of cold and warm light playing on the face. I used a full-body stock photo as reference, and had to really zoooom in on the face, but there was a lot of fascinating information in the flesh tones! There’s also a bit of drama in the lighting as well. I found there were subtle pale blues in the highlighted side of the man’s face, and some warm burgundies and purples contained within the shadows. I left the collar and hair very loosely rendered, because I was most interested in the colors of the flesh.
It’s painted on Gessobord, a favorite “guilty pleasure” painting panel. I keep obsessively collecting Gessobord. It’s a hardboard panel with a wonderful, smooth eggshell-textured white coat of acrylic primer on top. I love this painting surface but try to control myself and don’t use it all the time!
It’s pitiful that I haven’t updated this blog in all of this month. So I’m trying to slip something in, right under the wire!
I haven’t done as much as I’d like, but still, I have done some painting. I just haven’t posted it. There are some commissions in the works (will post them later) and other stuff. I had some busy-work in other areas that kept me from posting to this blog as much as I’d like. I hope to correct that now!
Here’s a Work in Progress. It’s almost done, but still needs a few tweaks and corrections. It is not done—emphasis on NOT DONE!
The thing that fascinated me about this portrait was the wonderful play of warm and cool on this woman’s face. Continue reading “Just because I didn’t want to have NO posts in March!”
I’ve been nursing this painting along for a few days. I considered it an interesting color study—I thought the reference photo (used with permission, of course) had so many fascinating colors, warm and cool, and a blue or green cast to them. I am not sure that this photo of my painting adequately captures what I was aiming for, though.
What I saw in the reference photo was a lot of cool pink cast, with some greens and blues in the flesh, especially the highlights. This photo looks like it has more orange in it. I see more subtle cool pinks in the painting.
Ah well, you can’t win them all!
It’s been a long, long day so I’ll leave this post brief for now, possibly adding more later.
Annnnnd . . . it’s another cat head! I love painting the cat heads, as if that wasn’t already abundantly clear!
I’ve found a rich source of cat head references, at PaintMyPhoto. Fellow PaintMyPhoto member Inge Dagmar Manders has generously provided several lovely photos of her kitties, and this is (I believe) the second photo of hers that I’ve used as reference for a painting. This is of her cat “Rocky.” He appears, at least in this pose, to be the epitome of innocence, with beautiful aqua eyes and a sincere look. Very likely Inge has a different opinion of him, knowing how cats will be!
What I loved about this kitty was the abundance of colors found in the fur. Warm and cool, pinks in the ears, around the nose and mouth. Blues and warm grays elsewhere, battling for attention, shaping the structure of the cat’s head. All wonderful stuff, I love it!
I painted this on a SourceTek panel (which you can buy at canvaspanels.com). Portrait-weave, oil-primed linen on Baltic Birch. What’s not to love? And love it I do! I have a lot of SourceTek panels stockpiled!
I feel bad for neglecting the blog for a little over a month! But I was waiting for my “big announcement.” And that is, I am now being represented by a fairly prestigious online gallery, UGallery. I learned that I was accepted to the gallery a few weeks ago, but it took a while to get everything set up and actually have my art go “live” on the site. I wanted to wait until it was all a done deal before announcing it.
They say that about 10-15% of artists who apply to UGallery get in, so I’m flattered to be among those accepted. But I must take into account that any gallery, anywhere, has an idea of what niches they want to fill, and so if they don’t accept every interested artist, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the rejected artists are “bad.”
My first day on the site was this past Thursday, and I was greeted on the main page with a graphic containing my cat paintings! Squee! Yes, I have no shame, I took a screenshot of it:
To any fellow artists who may have questions about UGallery, I have only been with them for a short time, so I can’t say much yet. Other than they seem to be detail-oriented (that is a good thing), friendly, and attentive to artists. Continue reading “New Paintings, New News!”
Emma sketched from life.
Warning, the sketches below (the “read more” button) are nudes! Continue reading “New sketches from life (nudes, NSFW)”
Words cannot express how much I loved painting this kitty! Big, proud, bodacious, this is some cat. A Mighty Fine cat. His whisker pads are something to behold. And look at the tufts of fur coming out from the tips of his ears! What a magnificent animal!
I enjoy painting white cats, or at least cats with significant acreage of white fur, because there’s so many colors to be found within. The white fur reflects the colors around the cat, and looking for the subtle shifts of color, changes from warm to cool, and attempting to capture that—it’s a lot of fun!
I used a Pintura Painting Panel for this painting. It’s touted as an archival panel, and has a very finely woven canvas. I enjoy the smoother texture for painting in this size.