Bro2

My Younger brother Sam on a very windy day, actually the same day as the ref for the painting 'Wind' so it sort of goes with that one. Soft pastels on 24 X 30 yellow pastelmat.

Proximo

Proximo, a grumpy old bastard from the movie Gladiator, wonderfully played by the late Oliver Reed.
15 min charcoal sketch, this was going to be another pastel portrait but I quite liked it just as a sketch so left it at that. Sometimes things just work (wish it was always that easy).

"Ultimately we're all dead men, sadly we connot choose when or how...but we can choose how we meet that end....so we are remembered as men"

Dad

My father Richard Cockwell, soft pastels on 30 X 40 orange pastelmat. This is based on a rather poor quality photo of an old photo (it's a good original, just a bit faded and behind glass). Interesting to work from a reference like this, up till now I've used high resolution reference shots, surprising how little you actually need from it when you're painting a subject you know well.

Reference photo:

Finished painting, quite pleased with this.

With the exception of my 'toddler' portrait I have not really done much more than headshots up till now, doesn't look like much but incorporating a hand in the portrait was quite a step for me, I was considering leaving it out but I felt it was essential to the image.

Bro1

Finished this yesterday, my elder brother Adam sitting out at a picnic last summer (must have been one of the better days).  Soft pastels and pastel pencil on 24 X 30 beige pastelmat.

I'm entirely satisfied with this which concerns me a bit, not sure that complacency about ones work is very useful.

Busy day

Started three pictures today, a portrait of my brother Adam in soft pastels, still from the movie LA Confidential in soft pastels and a drawing of our other dog Jill in coloured pencils.
Finished Jill this evening along with another painting I'd started last week....Phew!


This is the painting I finished this evening, Giant petrels (local name: Stinkers) fighting over carrion in the water, soft pastels on 30X40 pastelmat. Not particularly pleased with this, it did what I wanted it to, just not that happy with the look of the birds...more practice.

Our black, short haired border collie Jill. This is her 'glum' look (just been shut into the pack of the pickup with Boom, she loves being out but hates travelling, especially with that barking oaf). Polychronos coloured pencils & black sketching pencil on A4 cartridge paper.

Unison

Well...after being treated to a set of Daler-Rowney pastels by my wife last week....look what arrived in the post today,  

a rather nice set of Unison pastels. I was warned about these and the warnings were justified, they are soft, they are intense, once tried nothing else will do....all true, these are stonking pastels.

Knocked out a couple of quick hand sketches with them (that's sketches of hands by the way).

Hands: charcoal and pastels on white Ingres paper.

...and this one, Pastels on white Ingres (nice pastels Unison)

"I ain't like that no more"

Based on a still from the Movie 'Unforgiven', a great western. Directed by and starring Clint Eastwood it pays homage to the spaghetti westerns which made him a star of the western genre.
He plays William Munny, an ageing reformed gunslinger now a widowed and poverty stricken pig farmer. Munny reluctantly picks up his pistols to do one more job to help him support his 2 children. In the scene he sits in front of his campfire with his partner Ned Logan discussing the events of their wild past, Munny is trying to persuede himself that he will not fall back into his former wicked ways.

"I ain't like that no more. I ain't the same, Ned. Claudia, she straightened me up, cleared me of drinkin' whiskey and all. Just 'cause we're goin' on this killing, that don't mean I'm gonna go back to bein' the way I was. I just need the money, get a new start for them youngsters"

Soft Pastels (limited palete) on anthracite pastelmat, finished....probably.

To trace or not to trace?

Something that struck me whilst working on 'unforgiven' is the difference between my portraits where I have sketched the basic form freehand or where I have used a more scientific approach (grid or trace for me, I have no lightbox), what I notice is a much looser overall finish to the pieces that have been freehand throughout almost as if how the inital sketch of an image is executed colours the whole painting. I'm not aware of any conscious difference in how I continue a painting past that stage. Is this down the necessity of making small corrections to the form as the work progresses versus the fixed, accurate template that one works to if the initial sketch is known to be 100% correct? I have noticed a tendency in my work to elongate faces, particularly noticable in 'Mr Rochester', 'Goodbye Crow' and 'Unforgiven' (which is still in progress so it will be corrected to some extent). I can see the necessity of an accurate start with some media (I've learnt the hard way that with coloured pencils or crayons there's no room for major adjustment so they need to be dead right from the start), pastels however do give a great deal more freedom, discipline & accuracy vs freedom and creativity...interesting.

Pieces that were initially traced (or similar)

...and others that were done entirely freehand.

Hmm...perhaps there's nothing in it afterall in the results, just feel different somehow.