Thursday, January 8, 2009

Iron Giant Still Life

Today we held our third meeting of the DPC at my house, and today we welcomed a new member and fellow PAFA student, Joel Shambe. Today since there we decided to paint a still life so no one would get screwed out of painting by having to pose for the others. So Will, Dave and I grabbed a bunch of stuff from around my house, Dave grabbing my Iron Giant from the studio as the center piece. In a few minutes we had our still life ready to go on my dinning room table. I set up a nice light to give us a good light source and strong shadows that would be interesting to paint. We had to shoo my cat Scavee away a few times as he kept wanting to mess with the fun new toys on the table.
Like old Saint Nick we all set straight to work, above is my block in, I moved quick to try and establish the main values and relate what would be the brightest and darkest areas on the painting.
Here is Dave's awesome atmospheric block-in of the IG.
Here is Will's block-in, I think the composition here is a good set-up.
Joel took the almost opposite angle from me and this was his first time painting since he got back from serving his tour overseas.
The group painted away for a while and the we took a break and ate lunch at my fave resturant, Little Saigon. Below you will see everyone's final painting. I got to work on mine longer than the rest of the guys since the meeting was in house. This will be the last meeting of the group before we go back to school next Monday, but we plan on having another meeting asap.



2 comments:

Deb Strong Napple said...

Great idea, guys. All these "miles on the brush" are already showing in the quality of your work. Keep it up...stuff looks good!

Deb

Mike Manley said...

Thanks Deb, It's very true, the miles on the brush really help build you up and keep you also in the groove too.

Maybe you can join us sometime.