document real life

Just some fun with a paper cutout. I want to make more of these :)

I don't know what triggered the idea for my final painting of the semester, but I ended up wanting to do something based on some work by Peter Poplaski. Peter is a talented artist who is a big fan of Zorro :) He's also a relative of mine. If there's one thing Peter enjoys it's dressing up as Zorro. He's even done self-portraits as the masked hero.  You can find some examples of his work here. So, Pete, this is for you. I'm sorry if I don't do proper justice to your hero.

I do love dressing up for projects. Thank goodness I had some of the clothes. Alas, I didn't have a mask, rapier, or cape.

Not sure I'm 100% done. I think it needs some touches here and there. I did the basic design based on "The Mask of Zorro", but I wanted the costume to be more like the TV show.

One of our finals was to create a Postmodern painting. I really enjoy Kehinde Wiley's work (check it out here) so I wanted to do something along those lines. I recreated the pose of an 18th century portrait of a lady who had a red shawl and was holding a book. Anyone who knows me knows I love books and I am a bit of a daydreamer, so it all seemed rather fitting.

I'm quite happy with the figure, though overall I need to change/touch-up things once the paint is dry (greater contrast, change some of the background colors, etc.).

Last in-class painting of the semester. It was a 3 day painting with two models. Started with acrylic underpainting and added layers of oil, but left outline of acrylic poking through. Kind of a neat look. I'd like to experiment with it a little more.

Day 1 

Day 2

Day 3

Not too shabby. I like the background and the figure on the right. Other figure isn't too bad I suppose.