Another (small) painting begins...

I've posted a couple "in progress" photos of this to my FaceBook group, but I wanted to write more about it, here.

This is a brand new "small spider" (5 x 7 inches) painting, and is based on a section of an even smaller (3.5 x 5 inches) pen-and-ink drawing I made last week.

I think it's going well, so far. The background is airbrushed acrylics; the legs are painted using brushes, in oils.

I did very little preliminary drawing on this, (using the smaller pen-and-ink as my reference) and beyond the basic "pose" of the legs, I'm pretty much making this up as I go. The lighting bothers me right now, so I will probably spend some time "tweaking" the shading on the legs, before proceeding further.

I may add colour to the legs, and I may add details to the background; I'm not sure at this point. I like the "skeletal" look of the legs, but they do look a bit more like an underpainting than I prefer. We'll see.

Anyway, here it is, as things stand right now.

Still quite a bit of work still to do...

More new stuff...

Here are a couple more of the "Invented Face" paintings. The 'thin man' face is currently a grisaille--an underpainting--that I'm going to paint using the "Mische" technique, in which the entire painting is painted using successive layers of transparent red, yellow, and blue oil paint. After each oil layer is painted, white egg tempera is used to refine the image, redefining the highlights, to further "model" the forms. After the third (blue) layer has been painted, and the image is again (for the third time!) repainted, redefined, and refined using white tempera, the painting is finished using "regular" transparent oils.

The other face will also have some additional layers added, using both opaque and transparent colours, again paying careful attention to the modelling of form.

(I need to count how many of the Faces I have started so far. I'm sure that four of them are completely done, at least three more are nearly finished, and--including these two--the number is either ten or eleven.)

These are both 12x16, oils on canvas.