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All of the paintings here were painted from live models in a class or workshop setting. A class or workshop session usually lasts for 3 hours, but a model may return to hold the same pose over multiple sessions. Models usually pose for 20 minutes at a time, taking a 5 minute break between posing. When the model resumes a pose after a break, the pose is never exactly the same (especially if the same pose is repeated over multiple days), and so the artist must improvise, painting from knowledge of anatomical construction and design, rather than solely from observation. Hence, the artist must be a designer rather than a copyist of nature. All of these paintings were either oil or acrylic on canvas or illustration board.
Painting the Figure Within the Environment
Painting the Figure Within the Environment
In the summers of both 1995 and 1996, I took Craig Nelson's Clothed Figure Painting class at the Academy of Art College (now AAU), where we spent 6 hours a day painting from live models. As students, we tend to paint figures in isolation, not addressing how they fit into the surrounding environment and how the colors of the environment affect their skin tones. To address this problem, Craig developed the Clothed Figure Painting class, which emphasized figures within a setting. The next three paintings below were my efforts from that last summer of 1996, where I really tried to harmonize the colors of figure with environment., while also playing up the contrast of warm-verses-cool color. For the third painting below, the pose was not long enough to allow me to develop the environment, but hopefully the colors of the background are more or less harmonized with the skin tones.
To the three above, I am adding one more painting here which I recently found while cleaning my studio. This one was also from Craig's class in the summer of 1996. This one also illustrates my progress in painting the figure within a setting, tying together the colors of the skin tones with the surrounding background.
This last painting was from the year 2000, when I took Karl Gnass' figure painting class at the American Animation Institute, a school housed within the Los Angeles Animation Guild. While most students focused only on the figure, I went the extra mile to develop the surrounding environment, thus forcing myself to address issues of more complex composition, value pattern, and color. I believe that painting the figure within an environment pushes your painting skills much further.
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