Adventures In Provo Canyon

Last week I went up Provo Canyon to do some plein air painting with Adam Dove. I had only painted with oil once or twice before and I definitely wasn't confident using it. But he gave me some excellent pointers he learned from Perry Stuart and helped me along the way. It was a really fun experience and I'm starting to understand oil painting a little bit more. Now I know why so many people like it.

Even though we had put on bug repellent there were so many flies all over the place, and they had no problem landing on us and biting us. There's nothing better than having flies land on your eye while you're trying to paint with a brush in one hand and holding your pallet in the other. This guy landed in my cadmium yellow and got stuck for a few hours. My my, how the pallet has turned.

After he finally escaped my glob of paint I thought "Wow, I can't believe he survived." Right up until he waltzed his way into my little puddle of turpentine and started washing his hands and face as flies so often do. So whether he died right where I left him on the picnic table, or if a bird swooped down to get him for an easy meal and died from fly poisoning, either way he got what was coming to him. Let that be a lesson to the rest of you flies.

Figure Drawing

      These are some drawings of the figure that are from both figure drawing and figure structure classes. I didn't have a scanner big enough to scan them in so I used a camera to take a quick picture. Between the terrible lighting in our apartments, the newsprint, and that fact that I don't draw dark enough sometimes, some of them look kinda funky. I messed with them in Photoshop enough that you can see most of the basic outline.

    These figure drawing classes have been a huge help. At first I was kind of reluctant to take figure drawing and I probably wouldn't have if it wasn't required. But I am always surprised to see how much my drawing skills improve by the end of a semester with a figure class. I'm actually starting to enjoy drawing the figure now (and not just thinking of it as medicine) but I still have a lot of improving to do. I guess the human figure is the ultimate drawing practice, maybe that's why the masters have been using it for hundreds of years. . .

Nixon

Last semester our assignment was caricatures and I got Richard Nixon. My professor suggested that instead of going with the cliche' Watergate scandal, I do something positive that Nixon is known for. So this is Nixon opening relations with China, shaking hands with Mao Zedong. So I guess it was a dual caricature. I felt like Nixon was pretty easy to do, he has very exaggerated features. It was a lot of fun working in all the different textures and fabrics.