Jumps and Tunnel

Today was spent with my wife and dogs at "Handling Camp". My dogs, Fizz and Willow, are Bedlington terriers and they love to do agility. It's great training and a lot of fun to watch them do jump over "jumps", run through tunnels, and over an A-Frame/board walk. For their young age (almost 2 years old), they do extremely well.

So, today was "Handling Camp". This is mainly for the people training the dogs. Teaching them methods for effective ways to work with the dogs and efficient ways to cue the dogs to go where the trainer wants them to go.

Since I've got an art business and agility, although fun to do, is not my main interest, I went to just watch and help my wife out. I've got lots of time there waiting.... so, that means that I should pull out the sketch book and get some work done.

So, here's the tunnel and jump that they worked on. Next time, I'll have to get some practice sketching in with the dogs actually doing the jump.

Back to Figure Drawing

Now that I'm attending the Illustration Master's Workshop in June, time to get working on my figure drawing skills. After reviewing the images that most people worked on for the week, it became pretty apparent that figurative work played a major role.

It's been about 3 years since I've done any figure drawing practice and it definitely shows. My first several attempts showed how rusty I was. However, after some perseverance and going back to the basics of simple value work, things started falling in place.

For these drawings (my best drawings for the 3 hour session), I tried out my new watercolor pencils. I must say that I really really like them. You draw as you normally would, but, then use water to spread out the color and create the various value levels. I still need to figure out how to not oversaturate the colors and produce darker areas, but that will come in time. Now, it's just a matter of practicing with them.

In terms of the figurative work, the seated pose was definitely my favorite. The model was excellent. She did some amazing contorted/foreshortened poses and held the poses for a long time. As I get more practice in, I'll have to break down the body into parts and focus on trouble areas. Right now, I think that my major trouble areas are 1) face, 2) hands, 3) calves and 4) feet. More trouble areas will appear as I draw/paint the figure more.

But, it was a good first start back into this arena.

Still Life Study: Lemon - 3

Okay, another still life of a lemon. Yep, this is a "lemon" of a painting. I resolved the issue of the overlaying of too much paint, but it still doesn't look like a lemon.

The main issue seems to be the actual drawing of the lemon. The next step will be just to do a pen/ink drawing of the lemon. Once I get that foreshortened shape done correctly, I'll try to re-tackle the painting of it.

Still Life Study: Lemon 2

Last night's lemon was done with the traditional greyscale value painting.

This lemon is definitely causing me troubles. I can get the roundness of the lemon down okay, but the issue is that I'm back to putting on too much paint. Rather than getting the value correct the first time, I tend to put on the mid-value and then overlay more or less of the color. This causes the colors to become duller.

Tonight's solution to work around this will be to try to separate the lemon as a mosaic and just place down the color for each portion of the mosaic. Once that is done, I'll try to just blend the edges of the mosaic.

We'll see how that works out.

Still Life Study: Lemon - 1

Now that I've worked on apples for the last two weeks and I'm done with my website, time to get back to paintings. After trying a couple of failed attempts, I realized that I still need to study individual pieces of fruit.

So, next on the list are lemons. Back to the value studies of the lemon to get the shape correct and the roundness evident. One of my favorite colors to work with for value paintings is purple. It's easy to get the dark tones and light ones by using various levels of grey.

This painting came out okay. It's definitely a rounded object. However, the front "nub" of the lemon is not quite correct. Need to define the shadows better. In addition, the dark part of the lemon definitely loses part of the edge in the shadows, but, there should be a little more area of highlight and the darkest part is a little flat.

Okay, so, these are the things to work on for the next painting of a lemon.

Finished working on my website

Over the last week, I've had to stop working on painting and actually focus on the business side of my art work. For the last year or so, I've been using Facebook as my main website. I just pointed my domain to go directly to my Facebook Fan page. However, after thinking about it, II decided that I needed a website. Essentially, if people wanted to see my artwork or purchase it, it's too hard to look around Facebook to find out the paintings for sale and, then, they had to click on the link to go to my Etsy site to purchase the painting.

So, time for a redesign. The basic purpose for the site was to 1) show my latest work easily, 2) access my list of paintings, and 3) make the purchase of paintings and prints easy. Also, it was a minor financial decision. If I used Paypal to control the purchases, rather than Etsy, then I wouldn't have to pay a monthly fee.

As you can see from the main page, it shows parts of my paintings easily and shows what I am currently working on. Using the dark background, the image stand out clearly. Also, using a simple header, it's obvious what the site is used for and who I am.

For the showing of the images, I created the gallery page:

As the user clicks on a particular thumbnail, you automatically get the image. For each image, I show the size, title, size and whether the original has been sold or not. There are links to immediately purchase the painting or print or view the shopping cart. In addition, the user can use the Next/Previous buttons to flip through the images quickly.

My favorite part of the gallery is that you can easily access any of the paintings quickly and purchase a print/original with a single click.

In the future, I will be adding links for what shows I will be attending.

Now, I can get back to painting

Latest Painting: Differences

"Differences" is an original 9" x 12" oil painting created on a 1" stretched, high-quality canvas. The painting is presented as unframed (Sides are painted).

When thinking about painting a traditional still life painting of an apple, I started thinking about the differences between all of the still life setups. Same apples, but different way of looking at them. So, this concept emerged. In this case, the world looks the same to all of the apples except for this special one. He's just like the other one, but there is something different that your eye can see.

All Artwork is copyrighted to Doug Hoppes Studio and is not to be copied or reproduced in any form without the permission of the artist. Sale of this item does not transfer its copyright.