First session of the Spring 2011 semester.
With the new class schedule firmly set since Fall 2010, it is going to be "Wednesday" Painting Club from now on.

Matt, 18" x 14", oil on canvas

Painting Matt, I wanted to express the appearance of his seasoned character instead of clean superficial likeness. For that purpose I kept my brushstrokes rather short and a bit choppy.

At the very beginning of painting, I put down the edge on his right orbit just below the eyebrow as the hardest and adjusted other edges accordingly as the painting progressed.

Trying to keep the pose still, Matt's firm gaze seemed to magnify the intensity of his blue eyes. So I further accentuated them against the ruddy cheek below.

End of the semester group critique and pizza party.

Because many paintings were already hanging in the gallery as part of our annual show, we decided to hold our critique session there.

Tony Jurkash

Josh Kulacz

James Wisdom

Matthew Clymore

Keith Zeller

Marcie Paddock

Adam Nowak

When it was my turn, Marcie had gotten hold of the camera to take pictures.

Scenes from the third annual exhibit, About Face III.

Jeff, 20" x 16", oil on linen

Jeff, Kristin Mount’s husband, posed as our guest model. He came to the classroom with their two children who peeked on and off while their dad was painted.

As Jeff sat down to pose, he looked very serious and intense with alert eyes and a deep gaze, which is completely contrary to his personable and easygoing personality that I know in him. I had to be careful to avoid making him look too serious or even angry.

I thought about brushing in the gray from the background drapery, but his green shirt seemed to bring out the ruddiness of his complexion well against the white of the canvas, so I decided to do without it.

Ashton, 20" x 16", oil on linen

Ashton is a high-school admissions representative at the Academy, posing as a guest model for the second time. An illustrator himself, he offered to bring a few interesting hats for the session, including an old Chicago Bears leather headgear and an Aussie hat from his prop chest.

My plan for the painting was to take advantage of the connecting dark patterns to frame the light and warmth of his face. Without drawing any lines, I painted with a large brush moving from one shape of dark to another, starting with his hat, the shadow underneath, his neck and side, and then the shirt, before tackling the subtleties of colors on the front of his face.

He turned out to look like a rough ranch hand with an intense yet calm, even melancholy expression.

Rachel, 18" x 16", oil on linen

Rachel volunteered to pose for the club in the place of a member who couldn't pose as scheduled.

To paint Rachel, I chose a linen that had a medium-rough texture because I wanted to paint her with less smoothing of the painting surface. I wanted to leave brush strokes alone as they were laid with minimum manipulation on the canvas surface to give more spontaneous and expressive quality.

From the beginning of the pose I noticed Rachel would slowly tilt her head to the left. I thought that slight angle would give a subtle but interesting expression. Instead of asking her to straighten her head after each break, I just let her slowly settle her head back to her comfortable position and tried to capture the expression.

At some point during painting, it occurred to me that the way we operate with our "models" is sort of like a Ponzi scheme; as we get more new participants and the guest models, those of us who have been participating from the beginning of the club don't have to pose anymore but just keep on painting.

Dustin, 18" x 14", oil on linen

Before the session, Dustin “warned” us that he had chosen a very bright orange sweater to wear for the session. He said he was hoping to get some good color reflection onto his skin.

I didn't decide on painting the sweater until almost half way through; I was a bit hesitant about the prospect of the intense orange overwhelming the colors on his face. But if I were to include it in the painting, I knew I'd better lay some down before it was too late, so I decided to make it a part of the painting.

I used vermilion for his sweater color—a color that I don't use often. The vermilion from the tube was so similar to the sweater color that I hardly had to mix any color. On one hand, this made me almost feel like I was cheating and on the other hand, not having to mix the color myself took away the fun. Once I painted the sweater, I brushed in some warm color on his face to balance the colors.

‎Seventeen students came to today's session, the most participants ever since we started the club 3 years ago (we ran out of easels and had to put together an extra one to accommodate them). I was glad to see that so many students are willing to stay late to paint after a long day of school
–even though that meant I didn't get to go home until 8 o'clock, after everyone was done cleaning.

First session of the semester
It’s always good to see new and more participants.
With the new class schedule, holding our session from 4 to 7 instead of during later hours helped encourage more participation.

James, 18" x 16", oil on linen

James was the first model of the semester.
As usual, during the first session of the semester, with a few newcomers to help get started, I had a reduced time to paint. So I decided to paint James without much consideration for the background; just a simple and clean head study. Besides, I thought clean white background would work well against James' ruddy complexion

End-of-the-term group critique for Summer 2010

Once again, we were pleasantly surprised by how many paintings we did during the summer–and some good quality ones as well.

We started off with Joshua Gomez talking about his painting of Madelynn…

followed by Marcie Paddock.

Jacob Sanders

Listening to Jacob

Nate Tuttle

Kristina Knowski

Adam Nowak

Daniel Morris

Listening to OJ

OJ

Like last summer, OJ suggested we take a group picture at the end of the Critique. Our guest models, Stacey Lemp and Madelynn Dickerson were too shy to pose with us.