Megan Collins Artworks

I know it seems like I’m cheating here, but we ended up working on the same pieces for three weeks in a row. Work in class was painting a cast using one color, Titanium White and Ivory Black.

I have to admit it, I was dreading this after the last cast I tried to draw. However, this turned out to be a much faster process for me. Instead of using a pencil, I did the whole initial drawing with paint and continued on from there.

In the drawing class I think all I managed was to complete the outline of the figure and one breast, so I’m definitely getting better, faster, and more accurate.

Homework for all three weeks was another nude. Once again, I feel that it needs more work and I will have to do that later if I can find the time. This time we were painting from a photograph instead of a painting. This adds a degree of difficulty because when you copy a painting, the shading and conversion of 3D to 2D has already been accomplished for you.

I’m starting to look for my lost and found edges. This photo had a LOT of edges! I still need to adjust much of the tone in this painting. One of the things I do when painting from a photograph is to laminate the picture so that I can put my paint right on the picture to check whether or not my values are correct. Many of the values in this painting still need to be corrected! I will talk about this in another blog post.

For this class, things got a little more complicated. We all chose a painting of a nude to work with and copy as a study. This time we were allowed to mix our paints. This was what I did in class:

And our homework was more of the same. I have to work on that definition of simple though because this was anything but. What I thought would be simple turned out to be 7 spheres, multi-toned greenery, and architecture. I still haven’t finished it, I ran out of time this week.

During Week 2 class we had to paint a sphere using umber, black, and white.

This was about learning how shadows work and the graduation of tone without having color confuse the issue. In fact, the first two-thirds of this class aren’t dealing with color at all! This is also about learning how to work with straight paint and solvent before we start adding mediums into the mix.

Homework was about applying this skill to a simple photograph.