Corciano, Italy

So I am pretty much living the painters dream at the moment. Spending the summer in Italy with the Academy, little hilltop village called Corciano from the 13th Century. In between cheap wine and delicious Gelato there is the odd sober moment where I try my best to get some paintings and sketches done. Happy with the improvement up until midterm, color and paint handeling have improved a lot.

Quick studies

Spent the week in Norway, and in between catching up with friends and family I got some small studies done. Spent in between 1,5 - 2 hours on each of these. Basically a warm up session before I leave to Italy for the summer on Monday. I'll be spending 7 weeks in a small town north of Rome learning about Plen Air Painting, so look out for some landscape updates :D

Three last paintings of the semester

The first painting of the woman and the chair is a composite from two photos on Masonite board. I tried out Coles Phillip's Fade-away technique on the shawl, which I though was fairly successful. Seeing as the large shape of the figure is of to the left I was spending some time balancing it out with the more saturation, dark value and hue variation to the right of the picture plane.

The second piece is top view of wall street commenting on the near religious view a lot of people have of the capitalist economic dogma of todays america. Even in a time where the system has proven to be flawed people reserve their critiscism to mere details. The centered, strong and powerful composition was meant to build up on that. I believe the idea was a good one, but limited by my own lack of experience this one fell apart in execution. Did learn invaluable lessons on value pattern, saturation of lights/darks and shapes.

The third piece is a painting done for an in-class session on the figure in composition. I photographed the same pose from three different perspectives, then composited the figure together in photoshop without merging them. The idea is that the figure and composition study is of the same surgical nature as a dissection of meat.

Figure in interior

Painted my buddy Kamil while he was animating some tests for that new Dreamworks feature you'll bee seing in 2020!

San Francisco Cityscapes

We had a landscape/cityscape assignment in my composition class. I tried focusing on the designed and geometric aspect of the city, playing up the repetitive and primitive shapes found in our neighborhood and cities elsewhere. Had a lot of fun with these, and it is a revelation to truly understand the importance of composition.


Tried out a square canvas for the first time. My intent for this one was for the eye to move around as much as possible, not creating too strong of an area of emphasis anywhere.


In this one I was playing more with the use of color contrast as a means to lead the eye into a strong area of emphasis, which you hopefully find to be around the person with the umbrella. Again without the eye getting to stuck.

Portraits

Did a portrait of a couple of classmates. Should have spent a bit more time on the composition, there are a few tight spots here and there. Pretty happy with these though, it was fun to get to spend some time focusing on a face with my brushes. At least they recognized themselves!



Then another in-class painting, been trying hard lately to gain enough experience so as to go ahead and loosen up my brushwork. Thicker paint, and more confident color handling. Have a few happy moments now and again, and felt like I succeeded fairly well in this one

Oil Painting

This semester i picked up a brush and had a go at oil painting for the first time. Took the class Still Life Painting at school with teacher Brandon Smith. Really good painter with a beautiful handling of colour. Having hardly worked in colour before this semester I found it quite a challenge not getting my colours muddy or chalky. But hopefully we learn from our failures and I did enjoy the medium a lot!

Emulation of an artist (Final homework):
Pick a still life artist you like and analys his work method and visual landscape. Work in the methods of the artist, but do not copy a piece he has made. Being from Norway I've always enjoyed Odd Nerdrums work and chose to work in his method. He works very thick with small brushes and rags in the larger areas. At the end of a pass he dries the paint and sands down. Seeing as I did not have time to work on dry paint I skipped this part but tried to stay true to his painting technique. I found painting thick to be constantly exposing my lack of painting experience and kept going back to a thin application.

I found this great Odd Nerdrum referance; derekvanderven. A site dedicated to analysis of his techniques. Be aware that these guys are happy amatuers so don't take everything they write as facts. The site did help me a lot tho, it has changed a bit from when I used it. But as I could see, mostly for the better.

Mine worked out better as a rendering than as a painting in Nerdrums fashion. The coulour scheme worked out better. I achieved this with working a lot with venetian red and other earthly colours. Might have been a bit too ambitious to emulate an artist as sophisticated technically as Nerdrum. I have to say that I do love his rendering and might try to work more in this old renaissance fashion next semester.



In class work
Our classes were once a week from 8:30 to 14:50 in the afternoon. The object of each class was to paint on still life working with different tasks life birds-eye, high-key, reflective objects and so on throughout the semester. This one was the second to last day of the semester and we could compose our own still lifes. I chose a simplistic setup with a blue to yellow-red split compliment. I threw the cube with the letter "H" in there cause this was to be a christmas gift to my sister Hanna. H for Hanna, get it!? ... Hey, poort art students have to improvise




Homework piece (from photo referance)
Second to last homework assignment. My shared studio does not lend itself easily to still life painting, and seeing as I had allready painted my salt and pepper shaker and my only other interesting subject (shoes), were dirty. I decided to work from photo referance I took of my lunch. Had only ever painted from life before this and the photo presented a few interesting challenges. I found it easier to figure out the colours and to stray away from the referance in deciding what would make it into my painting. On the other hand when I ran into some issues with tangents and arias that did not read very well in the photo it was hard to make changes in the painting. So will I work more from photos? I think I will, but only in cases where it is important to capture something I will not get a chance to study in real life, i.e. interesting poses, moving objects, food that is rotting.

Oil Painting - homework

Oil painting - in class