March 8, 2010

Find A Way

This is the start of my latest piece, “Find A Way”… I have just finished the charcoal base of the woman. I’ll more than likely apply an ochre base to it and at some point before that I need to figure out what the background is doing or will be… at some point.

I’m definitely feeling this piece, this one is personal, a definite must for what I want to say right now and where I’ll be going… sometimes it gets deep, you know how it is… stay tuned, when I’m finish we’ll have a chat about life.

Plate of Fruit

My latest, pastel piece, a plate of fruit… completed first in charcoal

Next, I added a bit of purple to the yellow ochre to form the underpainting. I like the soft feel of this piece and how the complementary colours work together. Who would have ever thought yellow and purple could do this.

March 6, 2010

Ochre – The Foundations

I think I have reached a point where I know understand (to a sufficient degree) how to read the values in a photo/source material so that I can replicate it, in my style, using charcoal. The concept of reading values (lights, darks and their intensities) has been quite a learning experience. To a degree it’s not something I paid attention to much before because I tended to make up that part… and making it up seldom has the same effect as knowing how to replicate the real thing…

With that said, I have finally moved onto what I refer to as the “base painting”, the fist layer of pastel. In class I’ve been learning  to apply this first base in “ochre” colors and the results have been gorgeous. My first ochre pastel is shown in the previous post. I’ll post my latest piece soon to show you the growth over the last 2 weeks.

Here’s a little background on exactly what ochre is:

Ochre or Ocher is a term for both a golden -yellow or light yellow brown color and for a form of earth pigment which produces the color. The pigment can also be used to create a reddish tint known as Red ochre. The more rarely used terms Purple ochre and Brown ochre also exist for variant hues. Because of these other hues, the color Ochre is sometimes referred to as Yellow ochre.

Ochres are among the earliest pigments used by mankind, derived from naturally tinted clay containing mineral oxides. Chemically, it is hydrated iron (III) oxide. Modern artists’ pigments continue to use the terms Yellow ochre and Red ochre for specific hues.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochre

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February 25, 2010

Bowl of Apples

It has been so long since I’ve posted but for good reason! I’m busy creating new pieces and it feels good! Here is my latest charcoal and pastel piece, a simple bowl of apples done in ochre.

Apple Bowl

February 21, 2010

Sleeping Baby

This is my favourite piece to date! This one is also done in charcoal.Arima Sleeping (1)

February 12, 2010

Twitterfied

Guess who is now on Twitter…Holla at a sistah!! FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER

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February 4, 2010

Scallion – Allium Ascalonicum,

After doing the charcoal garlic below, I completed a lose up of a scallion. I was not completely happy with this one and had a lot of frustrations along the way to it’s completion. However, I’m glad it’s finished and more importantly this piece taught me a few lessons regarding the do’s and don’ts of charcoal… Like don’t attack the paper with heap white chalk because you’re unable to create the proper white spaces and see the tone values… uuh yeah don’t do that… Anyways, what will it be net, revisit that garlic or move on to a  few other still life objects… Stay Tuned!

January 26, 2010

Garlic – Allium sativum

I started a charcoal picture of a two garlic bulbs. In this first picture I’ve just completed the first bulb. I’ll post the finished piece by end of week.

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And here is the finished piece a week later. I’m pretty happy with this one. I think I’d definitely like to revisit Garlic again, and maybe do a mini series with 3-4 pieces.

January 16, 2010

Laundry – Old School

Here is the very first piece from my class, and my first ever charcoal piece. It depicts two women hanging out laundry…

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Working with charcoal is so much different from the techniques I use with pencil. When using graphite you typically start with your lights and gradually build upon them to make the necessary sections darker, however, with charcoal it’s the eat opposite where you first begin with your darks and subtract to gain the lights.

And of course charcoal is MUH faster so I an essentially complete a piece in a few days, as oppose to a few weeks. I just need to do a few more of these to gain a better understanding of how to find the various light/dark values in any photo and transfer them into the piece.

January 5, 2010

Wordle.Net

Love this! You can create your own collage at Wordle.Net

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