Everything in this painting exudes elegance to me.  A tender plant, a dainty chain necklace and a beautiful curvy vase/pitcher. Enjoy!

Elegance  (Click to Enlarge)

Here is another sketch of a rather good looking gentleman with a Cool haircut… I don’t think my sketch does justice to his haircut.  I don’t think many people can pull-off this kind of haircut, but it suited his chiseled face quite well.

I did show him this picture, but I forgot to get his name… oops!  He enjoyed looking at his sketch.

For my artist friends:  I used a Sienna (i.e Red-Brown), Umber (Brown-Black) and White for this sketch.  Took 30minutes.

Hello All,

I transformed the previous monochrome portrait into color (please see the previous post, just scroll down).  This meant more staring at myself in the mirror.  I played with cropping of the final painting and I found that I liked it cropped this way.

Oh! Well I plan to do many more of this, the only model that is willing and available 100% of the time is myself.  Many more poses and hopefully with a smile.

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Self Portrait (Staring into the mirror)

I have been doing lots of self-portraits to push my skills to the next level.  This is a monochromatic study in,  oil of myself, in Transparent Oxide Brown and Gamsol.  Down the road I will be posting full palette color portraits of myself, once I feel they are good enough to share with the world.

I don’t feel I am ready for prime-time when it comes to self-portraits.  To me, self-portraits are the hardest for several reasons.  The subject, meaning myself, keeps moving every time I look into the mirror and back to the canvas.  The mirror inverts the image. So, no matter how accurate you are, you will always paint a latterly inverted image of yourself. The most hardest, to explain and understand, is that my features appear different, every time I see myself in the mirror, which makes things a little challenging.

Monochromatic Study