This was is a miss on a number of fronts and hopeful I can learn from it. The original photograph shows a friend's child riding a bicycle in some desert terrain near their house without any clothes on. I started trying to paint the background and just ended up with an ugly, muddy mess. So i re-did the background in washes of color instead of throwing it away and set to work. No matter how I tried, I could not get the face just right. So I ended up over-working it and it became blurred and soft, no edges, no definition. So when I painted the bike and it came in crisp and more powerful, it overwhelms the figure. So, I learned a new background technique that I like and that I need to keep working at figure and faces to get more comfortable (and work in bigger scale so I am not stressing to get detail in such small proportions).

Posted by Steve Medcroft at 06:39 PM | Permalink

I have a series of reference photographs of the items I use or carry with me when participating in my favorite passion - cycling. I have shots of my helmet, shoes, a spare inner tube. This still life started as just the cap and glasses but because I drew in the cap centered low and right, I added the waterbottle to give it more balance. I am happy with the colors, the shading, the lettering, the backgrounds. I got the outline of the cap a little wrong (nothing too drastic) and wish I got the glasses lenses and frame more perfect against the original but overall I am happy with this picture and feel like it marks progression in my ability to pull of a picture as I conceive it.

Posted by Steve Medcroft at 03:21 PM | Permalink

This is my first real portrait - of my granddaughter. I used a cell phone picture as a reference and used a ruler to be as exact as I could with the spacing and shape of the eyes, nose, mouth. I was happy with how the shading and highlighting of skin came out (finally getting a good skin color in acrylic now). I was happy with the shape and proportion of the legs. I was really happy with the overall finished picture. I liked the background (textured, chunky strokes with complementary color) but I wish I would have painted in the background from the photo (a black couch).

Posted by Steve Medcroft at 09:25 PM | Permalink

I did these three little landscape/florals from some photos I took in a wetland park behind a community center in Sebastapol California where my wife was attending a bellydance festival. I worked on them at one time - as a set, as I am really happy with both the small format, the way that produced a more richly textured work, the fact that they are more interpretive than photo realistic but you can still tell what they are. They look really nice framed and hung together as a set on our living room wall

Sebastapol Wetlands number one - happy with the colors and the shapes. Could have done better with the tree in the background and the direction and highlighting of the grass strands.

Sebastapol Wetlands number two - Really happy with the shapes and colors and patterns here. Even though this does not look exactly like the photo, it came out just the way I wanted.

Sebastapol Wetlands number three - Really happy with the central plant and the overall confusion of the multiple plant stalks and grass around and behind it. I think the colors came in a little too blue for this one and I'm unhappy with the pods above the main plant (back-grounded by sky).

Posted by Steve Medcroft at 09:17 PM | Permalink

I adapted this from a photo I took of my son looking out into the sunset at Laguna beach around Christmastime last year. I was happy with the sky and much of the water coloring. But the water in the photo has a liquid-metal quality that I just couldn't get. I also missed on the water colors - the purples were there in the photo but much different than I ended up in my picture. I was happy with silhouette - especially since I didn't settle for black and used dark versions of every color from the photo (learning again that shadows are not blackened versions of colors but deeper and darker shades).

Posted by Steve Medcroft at 09:11 PM | Permalink