a painting a day a story a day: Pleased with this charcoal drawing that took me 3 ...

a painting a day a story a day: Pleased with this charcoal drawing that took me 3 ...: Pleased with this charcoal drawing that took me 3 hours, I just hung around doing nothing the rest of the day. What a waste of time! I suspe...

Pleased with this charcoal drawing that took me 3 hours, I just hung around doing nothing the rest of the day. What a waste of time! I suspect it is because of the satisfaction I get after I do one good painting. Conclusion: keep satisfaction at bay!

It strikes me that artistic endeavor calls for a particular mood that artists try to get in before they embark on a new work. I have heard many artists saying they failed in a certain artistic creation for not being in the right mood. On the other hand it is no secret to anyone that great art works result from hard work and ceaseless practice. So should we artists await our moods  of creativity or should we just keep working?


I personally believe that any artistic endeavor has to be punctuated by breaks of introspection, or you might say I am just making up an excuse for sloth.





Tehrani girl in nomadic costumes



Bakhtiari maid of honor

Charcoal on paper

Here is another charcoal portrait of the same girl from my last post. I am pretty much satisfied with it, and this is the only work I am content with this last week.

The procedure:

 I first covered the paper with vine charcoal powder which was then brushed downward off the paper. Next I massed in the darks in just a slight shade darker than the background, and the fun part was when I began to bring out the light parts of the face using my kneaded eraser! For the highlights though I cheated a bit and used a white pastel - wish I could do that with my eraser!

a painting a day a story a day: Portraits in oil

a painting a day a story a day: Portraits in oil: About this portrait : I painted this old dervish earlier this year. It had been a while since I had done my last grisaille portrait, an...

Portraits in oil

About this portrait :



I painted this old dervish earlier this year. It had been a while since I had done my last grisaille portrait, and its always an excellent learning experience. My limited palette contained black, white, yellow ocher and burnt sienna.
I had a few photo references for this model: all low-quality with uninteresting backgrounds, so I extended the wavy beard wisps into the background to give it a mystical air.






( Sold )

Appreciating Susan Lyon

Drawing in Graphite

Greatly inspired by Susan Lyon, I did a few portraits in Graphite with a conscious attempt to keep them as pale looking as possible. Here I am posting one. Now I see it is really challenging because, while you are doing the rendering, the temptation is to go dark for details; However, if you want to keep it pale you just need to constantly fight that temptation, and you have to put on the brakes all the time.

The other issue is that a pallid portrait might look too weak, or even worse it might look like an ailing person. When you look at Susan's portraits in monochromatic pastel you can see how the pallor helps creat a romantic, but not insipid, look on the face. 

                                                                                                                                                                         

On the left is posted One of Susan' works which is my favorite:  Like all the masters she has gone minimalist, not too generous with the pencil marks, yet look how this face

is emitting power and character !

  Story of the Day: 

Howard Lives

by Joseph Berman

I read this story through tears, alot of it, of laughter. A guy named howard refuses to obey the Death Angel, and roams around the town greeting everybody after he has totally died. You can find this story and many others of all genre in this website:   http://www.short-stories.co.uk/