So in the future, parties at our house won't get out of hand.

This is due on Monday so I am on the home stretch. Tonight I worked on the razor blades and the cut hair, mostly, as well as lightening up the upper right corner. I darkened the ear. I also lightened part of the hand print, but that makes it too much of a "baby blue" for now. Tomorrow night I will do a little more work in the hair and do a cobalt blue wash over the lightened part of the handprint, which should maintain much of the lightness, but return the depth of color.

I've sat down at this thing on 14 separate days! That's over twice the length I've spent on any of my other paintings, I think. Anyway, here is where it currently stands... Note that there is a sort of "glow" next to the nose that will go away, also the lips look kind of "puffy"... both of those are simply cases of the paint getting too wet and built up and I can't refine them any more until the paint dries, so they're frozen at sort of an awkward stage. Anyway:

Ok so I'm done painting and going to bed (gosh, and it's only 4am!) but here is what I worked on:

• eye detail


• paint tube detail


• detail on the Big Hand


• more hair detail


• removed masking tape from bottom razor blade

Here's what I got painted tonight:



I darkened the area to the left of the neck, fixed some stuff in the eye on the right, did a little more hair stuff. Then I added more paint streaks in the hair, and some highlights on the paint coming out of the paint tube. I also decided I didn't like the way the snipped hair at the bottom looked so I masked out the razor blade and painted over it, so that I can redo it.

My living room doesn't have very good lighting so the progress photos I take at home always look a little off both in color and in how light/dark they are. *sigh* Maybe I will try to take one during the day tomorrow before I paint again.

Have I mentioned that this is a really BIG painting!?

Just for fun I took this picture of the eye with a tape measure next to it. If you use your image preview software and do zoom in/zoom out you can get the picture to where the inches on the tape are actually an inch on your screen and get an idea of how big it is in real life.

Today I took the masking tape off the fingers! Hooray! I also painted the bristle part of the paintbrushes, dirtied up the handles a little, and then mostly concentrated on details in the face.







I brought everything home so I can paint on it over the weekend. It's coming along, slowly but surely. I think it will turn out pretty cool when it's done.

So today I worked mainly on the hair. I'm trying to get the hair hair finished, then I will go back and add the paint-in-the-hair hair after. In the process of filling in the hair, a lot of the previous "color streaks" have been painted over, but they'll be back. I also painted the metal part of both paintbrushes. I then decided that I just really didn't like the top razor blade at all. The angle it was at was very awkward and made it look like the razor was a thick metal, when really it's just the edge at a very oblique angle. I want a razor blade there, I think, but for now I painted over it and will decide whether to add it back (at a different angle) later or not. I'll have to wait and see.



The hair is fun but I could easily see getting carried away and continuing to paint it for the next three years.



I left it at the school until Friday, because I have a paper due on Friday and will not have time to paint before I am back in the class anyway.

Yesterday in class I worked mostly on the hair and a little more on the razor blades. Here is how it's coming so far:


The fingers are still masked and will probably stay that way at least one more day of painting, if not more. I want to get the tape off as soon as I can, though, because it's distracting to me and disrupts my ability to really "see how it's going" accurately.

I worked on the hands, the paintbrushes, and the hair. To make sure I didn't mess them up I masked off the fingers of the lower right hand with masking tape. It took a lot of tape. Slowly, slowly, progress is made. Oy!


Full size

I need to call Adobe tech support because I can't get Photoshop to work on my laptop, so I wasn't able to re-square the picture this time or brighten it (if I use the flash it looks goofy, so I have to take it without and then increase the exposure in Photoshop, usually) so it's a bit dark. Sorry. I'll try to remember to come back and fix it.

Today's progress

I mostly worked on the eyes and some of the face, added a bit to the hair, and started on the razor blades.

Here's how the painting looks after today's work.

I primarily worked on the eyes, though the one on the right (the left eye) isn't finished. Actually neither are finished, because the highlight isn't painted on yet, it's just "blank" right now. It's really weird working on eyes that are so big. They're only a little smaller than my head is in real life. I have to keep backing up 15 feet or so to see how it's looking, because at that close range you really just can't tell what it's looking like.

I also did some minor work on the nose and ear (the pink spot in the ear won't be that bright, but I have to let it dry before I can touch it more) and a very little bit on parts of the face and neck. Have I mentioned this painting is going to take forever?

Today I mostly painted the tube of paint in the upper right corner. I spent a good deal of the class period getting food and then eating, because I was going to die otherwise, so I didn't have all that much time to paint.

I'm submitting four paintings tomorrow to the student art show. I just got done framing the two new ones, and I'm also submitting two from last spring. Here are my four entries:



Cross your fingers! There are three people jurying the show, and I have no idea what kind of thing they're "going for" with this show, so I don't know what to expect. I hope my stuff gets in.

Dominic and his legs...

We were out yesterday evening when we saw a bus with this ad on the back:

Viktor Kee performing at the Cascade of Stars show (IJA festival).

[I just edited my profile to include a note about these photo posts. You can jump straight to the note here.]