Foreshortened picture of Mark

At first I was really excited to do this, because I liked how weirdly foreshortened it looked. However, the more I worked on it, I realized that it wasn't reading as "foreshortened" - more like "pin head". So, another "live and learn"...I learned a lot about painting cloth in this one, though. It's not quite finished. I should do more to the window area and a few other details but I'm tired of looking at it.

Flowers - done months ago but when I changed the title it moved it to the front of the posts

I wasn't even going to post this, because I didn't really "get" the assignment we were doing, but here it is - my first ever painting with flowers in it. I should not have painted in the blue background, but live and learn...

Yupo Paper portraits

(not finished) I decided to try a portrait (actually took these pictures myself at a reenactment) using the Yupo paper. The first one was not fun at all. I ended up wiping the whole thing off and starting over since the paints just ran all over the place. The second time I used a little brush and kept the paint brush more dry. I'm not crazy about the effect of this - although I like the pose and will probably do another one of Mark (friend I used to teach with) using regular paper.

The second picture is a quick sketch (very small sketch) I just did with a thin marker and dabbed with some watercolor. I like this approach much better for this paper. I need to get some permanent markers because the one I had tended to bleed into the watercolor. I'm going to explore this method some more.

Yupo Paper - Abstract

This week, our class assignment was to create an abstract using Yupo paper. This paper is actually plastic - so it takes forever to dry and your paint runs all over the paper. I'm really not comfortable with abstracts, but here's my effort so far. I'm not sure where to take it from here. (trash?) 'Doubt if I'll ever do another abstract, but who knows?