Skip to main content

Tim's Home Run

26" x 20", watercolour on Yupo, 2012, private collection

This was my only watercolour painting for 2012 and it was a bit of a challenge since the reference material was a black and white newspaper photo from when Tim Nikita (my brother-in-law), the foreground subject, was in high school. There was very little detail to work with and figuring out the colour scheme of the uniforms was difficult as the high school no longer has a baseball team and archival photos don't seem to exist online (I couldn't ask Tim because his fiancée, Meagan, commissioned this as a surprise Christmas gift).

Meagan discreetly asked around and got me some colour notes for Tim's outfit, but I coloured the opponent to best contrast Tim while keeping somewhat in line with the photo ref.

I couldn't really see the details in Tim's face so I made this about the action of him running to home base rather than it being a traditional portrait of him. Incidentally, I snuck Tim into my portrait of Meagan for my Burning the Midnight Oil ink painting marathon, but you can barely see his face there, too, so maybe I should just do a full-on portrait of the guy some day...

Pencils clearly visible, the first blocking-in of colour begins.

Shadows and skin (including baseball glove) are blocked-in; foliage is delineated between bushes and grass.

Temporary chaos as more areas are blocked-in and the splattering of paint really gets going.


Addition and subtraction: some details are carefully painted while taking some paint away better defines the shapes.


Erasing paint with a brush lightly loaded with clear water creates nice highlights, separating the figures, and further clarifying the forms.


Nearly there: only one final pass of finicky details, adding and subtracting, is needed to complete the painting.




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Axel Foley's Chevy Nova (1/25 scale model)

Multiple tributes, here. I remember first seeing  Beverly Hills Cop  on video at my friend Chris K's house, 'cause his family had a VCR and we'd watch tons of movies (and record music videos) together. The summer of 1984 was a special time for us (having created a strong bond in school since Grade 6 a few years before), going on biking adventures around the 'burbs and into the city, etc., and home video played an important role from then until I moved to the opposite end of Scarborough just before we started high school. We liked the movie a lot, both of us fans of Eddie Murphy from his  Saturday Night Live  days. I don't think I'd seen the movie since then (it would have been 1985, probably summer, since the movie came out in late 1984) and I became curious to see if it still held up. It did. It does. I found Murphy as charming as ever and the comedy (and even the action) holds up very well and its very re-watchable and very entertaining.  Beverly Hi...
6 comments
Read more

Small Pond Arts Puppet Wagon (1/24 scale model)

I dreamed up the Small Pond Shipyard for my fanciful scratch-built sci-fi airship creations (which still only exist in sketch/Photoshop mock-up form (and boxes in my closet) for now), but more and more ideas kept coming ( this wind turbine , for example, will be part of a rather elaborate diorama I'll be working on this winter). But the Puppet Wagon was a sleeper surprise, to be sure. [Really, though, I don't know why I was so eager to build this right away since I was planning to slowly develop my modelling skills with simpler builds first and the work my way up to more complicated projects.] Not all parts were used/needed. Most of these ideas have come from watching modelling videos online, and when I saw a review of this sweet little Japanese "Ramen Shop" food truck by Aoshima (right-side drive!), my brain started making jokes about customizing it to the weird food truck ideas I'd been posting on Facebook. But the more I thought about what the co...
2 comments
Read more

City of Angels

17" x 11", watercolour and digital, 1999 Ah, City of Angels . I thought I was getting cool film noir but got a cheesy musical instead (Google it if you must). Still, it was fun to make the poster and associated images, mostly because the research consisted of watching real films noir and buying a great book on movie posters of the genre. I made tons of sketches and a few digital mock-ups. For the final poster above, I made three separate watercolour paintings (one of the couple and one each of the two black and white heads) and composited them in Photoshop, where I also added the text. In true movie poster fashion, I wanted the actors names to be the top two names, but I lost that battle and had to use the characters' names instead. It looks fine, but it implies that "Kingsley and Stone" are the lead actors in the show. Oh, well...it's only community theatre... By making the "angel" above half black and white and half colour, th...
Post a Comment
Read more