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

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 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

I had a bicycle accident and had to have surgery and was kind of obsessed with the whole process for a while. This painting is an interpretation of an x-ray showing the titanium appliance holding my radius bone together. I liked how the background and different gray values came together. The appliance detail is not true to the original (didn't pay enough attention to the fine detail again) and I wussed out on the wrist bones so that part is not accurate either.

Posted by Steve Medcroft at 07:30 PM | Permalink

This was my first painting on a canvas. I took a long time to complete it. I like the way the fabric and skin looks. It showed me a path to a style of painting that I cam back to after a few experiments you'll see in later posts. I botched the proportions of the baby's arms, the mother's hand, and the face completely (look at it sideways). It taught me that you can't do human features by sight - I now use a careful grid sketch and even pull out a ruler to get the proportions of things more correct. Still learning.

Posted by Steve Medcroft at 07:25 PM | Permalink

This was my first attempt at a painting after a half-dozen color pencil drawings. I was happy with the way it looked like what it was supposed to look like. I was happy with discovering how to use highlight colors and that colors are never solid (added blue in the black shorts and gray in the white of the jersey. I botched the detail in the helmet and handlebars and pay more attention to fine detail now. I also learned to not apply acrylic straight to paper - the paper absorbs moisture from the paint and buckles. I use canvas now but if I do ever use paper again I will prep it with gesso.

Posted by Steve Medcroft at 07:20 PM | Permalink

For this picture, I switched to gray paper and loved the way it made the color pencils pop. I was happy to work out a way to get the detail in the bicycle chain (I used a little stencil to outline every individual link) and the spokes in the wheel (following a wheel-builders manual, I used a ruler to get the layout right and the lines straight). I really didn't have anything critical to say about this one after I finished it.

Posted by Steve Medcroft at 07:11 PM | Permalink

Posted by Steve Medcroft at 11:31 AM | Permalink