Dance poster & Figure Painting

Sorry for the lack of updates. Last week I completed two color illustrations and so I kinda took this week off to relax a little bit, plus I am dealing with a pretty heavy deadline in the summer class I am taking (more about that in another post.)

Here is the poster I completed for the dance classes offered at Longview.

Spent the most time on the figures, and rushed the design aspects.

Kinda on the same theme as my figures above I thought I'd throw in some of the work I did in my Figure Painting class last semester:

This is about where I ended up in my acrylic painting methods. I achieved this by painting completely greyscale, and then building the color up first with light washes and then punching it with solid colors from a limited pallet. I hope to continue this method in my Plein aire class this fall.

I'm going backwards in my progression. This was another mile-marker in the sense I got a real control of form and value by using a monochromatic range of color...but my problem occurred because I would then lose control of the figure when I started to add light washes of newer colors over the top. (an effect easily satisfied in photoshop with the multiply function. sigh...)

18"x24" on gessoed strathemore drawing paper (how I did all my paintings for this class). Our first class we painted her nude and then the next we could either paint over our old one with her wearing the dress or paint a new one. I painted over my old one. This was my first full session figure painting in the class.

At first I just jumped headfirst into painting unsure of what I was doing, but by the end of the semester I had really built up my confidence...most of this was due to the dozens and dozens of small test paintings I did at home (none of which will see the light of day. haha) I hope to do more of these in the future and should maybe spend more time with acrylics (since it really helped me understand more about my Photoshop painting process).