Two New Life Paintings

I spent four hours on this life painting of Aine and then I left it for fear of losing any freshness that there was in the brushwork.
I'm very lucky to attend an all day drawing session, but the diminishing natural light in these winter afternoons means that the subject looks very different than they did in the morning session.
I am always tempted to keep reworking the tones and shadows as the daylight fades and the artificial light becomes dominant.
All in all I think it's best to start a new piece if possible.
So I did the study of our other model, Rubén, holding a broomstick in two hours under over head spotlights. And, although I usually prefer natural light, I found this effect quite striking.


Knowing when to leave a painting or an illustration alone is a constant difficulty. The great thing about the life room is that it imposes tight time constraints on you, and what any good artist learns from that will hopefully inform the other types of work they do.

Large Painting of Rubén

This painting is a bit larger than the life studies I usually do. It is about 30" x 20".
I left it after a few hours because I liked the quick sketchy quality that it has, and I moved on to do the portrait study below for the last hour and a half.

Life Studies of Ruben

Here are a couple of life studies of one of my favourite life models, a young Spaniard named Ruben.
Ruben is very interested in the whole artistic process and takes great pains in finding and holding good poses. By necessity our longer poses tend to be a bit more static than dynamic though.