Last Thursday I went to a special donors luncheon at our local PBS television station, KVIE. The keynote speaker was Paula Kerger, president of PBS. During the luncheon, I was painting a portrait of Big Bird and Mr. Rogers. At the end of the event, I pulled one of the attendee's names out of a crystal vase and they were the winners of this painting. Following that and on stage, the general manager of KVIE, David Lowe, presented Paula with a special thank you gift..a Lobenberg portrait of her..
He gets very ornery but more frightening than that, he's gargantuan and hungry! Well, actually, he is only a watercolor painting on 140 lb. cold press paper, 16 inches by 22 inches. I worked from a photo reference that I found online. Not your average view of a rooster. His head was painted wet-on-dry and the background and the partial view of his body was painted wet-on-wet. An imposing beast, indeed! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!
At University Art in Sacramento, I teach a two hour acrylic painting class two Thursdays per month. Our current project is to paint a portrait from a reference photograph. This is the progression of my drawing done with an 1/8 inch wide flat brush. I have just started to paint in some values here to bring out volume. When we meet next, my students will learn how to mix flesh colors/ tones, and we will paint those over our initial mono-toned rendering. I'll be posting that stage in about two weeks. On that post, you will see that this young woman is wearing a beret. She reminds me of a World War II French resistance fighter. She is actually one of my drawing students at Sacramento City College which by the way is shrinking down to nothing with the miserable state of California's economy. I'm not sure I will even have a teaching gig there by Spring semester of 2012.
The PBS newscaster Jim Lehr that I painted a portrait of and posted a few posts ago, I really like. Honest to goodness I do. I mean it. Swear on a stack of telephone books (are there still telephone books around?)... however...I thought I'd take a crack at another portrait of him with a different composition, but more importantly, with warmer, more saturated color and with the paint brushed on thicker and more layered. Ipso facto and la de dah, herewith is the result!
Here is my final portrait of PBS star Huell Houser. The face is less worked over and the background , which always challenges me, has an energy (through brushwork) , and colors that not only reflect the upbeat personality of Huell, but harmonize nicely with the colors in his face. Would you agree?
I'm not happy with any of my Huell Howser paintings so I'm working on another one. Stay tuned and meanwhile here is a photo of me with a bantam rooster on my arm.
Huell Howser is a well-known PBS television host who has a show titled California's Gold. This is an acrylic portrait of him that I have been working on. The beauty of acrylic painting is that you can make changes very quickly unlike with slow drying oil. Here are my changes. The bottom photo is my last change. Am I done with Huell?...maybe.
You won't see this on CNN! - BREAKING NEWS!!!! This newly discovered, discarded cigarette package ( I found it on the ground just outside my favorite Chinese corner food store ) is more important than you might think at first glance! Yes, behind the Chinese cigarette package is a an acrylic portrait that I am currently working on, but DO NOT BE DISTRACTED! Click on the photo to enlarge it and look at the chinese characters in the top row of lanterns. What they say is nothing short of remarkable!!! They say, "National state secret: American president Barack Obama was NOT BORN IN AFRICA, he WAS BORN IN SHANGHAI." I wanted to be the first to break this news! I will be emailing my good buddy Donald Trump immediately!!! I felt, however, that my dear blog readers should be the first to know. Thank you all and good smoking!
He must be a Lawrence of Arabia lookalike...check out that head gear. But did Lawrence do plein air painting? Hold the phone!!!...I think this is me doing my thing a few years ago!