Plein air oils!

Plein air paintings done over the last few days. All are oil on canvas or canvas panel, and most are about 14"x18" (the bottom one is 20"x28"). This is my first week of plein air oils. Watercolor on location now seems easy by comparison. Most of these will be reworked at least a little bit in the studio. Still learning how to handle all that wet paint on the canvas and keep it from turning to mud.

Figure drawing

I finally made it out to one of the figure drawing sessions down in the mission. All drawings are pencil or conte. Poses range from one minute (sketches at the bottom) to twenty minutes (sketches at the top).

Rowdy jay style

Back to drawing birds at the California Academy of Sciences. It's been a while since I've done any drawing with sharp pencils (last time I drew the birds was in November), so I thought I might start with conte. It was messy and kind of like making sculpture. Lots of fun and pretty surprising at the same time.