Figure en plein air
3yr
Mengu Gungor
Did some outdoor figures this week, and just sharing them here. This was my first experience painting the figure outdoors from life (I'm used to drawing with studio lighting). The sitting pose was the first day. It was a shorter session, between 2 and 3 hours. We started the standing pose on day two, I worked primarily on values this day, but it started raining part way. So we went inside, and I worked on a quick portrait sketch. Third day started with a bit of rain, but we had the model take the standing pose indoors, it was good enough to fix some "drawing" issues. The rain stopped about 20 minutes later, and we were able to go back outside. However, the wind did not stop. Joys of plein air. The sitting pose was under the cover of some tree shades with a bit of sunlight streaming down. The standing pose was generally just an overcast sky. I have a different approach to painting figures vs landscapes, and combining them was an interesting challenge (one of many). Happy to hear any feedback or tips as I'd like to try this again some time. I felt I was particularly bad at time management and what to focus on. All sketches done in Procreate on iPad Pro.
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Serena Marenco
Wow, the second one is amazing!
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Yiming Wu
Wow I love the second one where the texture around the head makes a "glowy" effect! You did wrinkles quite well I think, I have some hard time drawing wrinkles on different kinds of fabrics. This make the figure more vivid. The background of the first one seems a bit soft, maybe it could use some harder edge somewhere. :D
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Elias Lemus
Nice work! My suggestions are as follows.. both the time management and not knowing what to focus on can be alleviated at least a bit by starting each piece with an intention. What is your goal? Are you practicing anything in specific? Value? Color? The effects of light? Proportion? This will help you put an emphasis on one or maybe a couple things and as far as what to focus on, is there a weakness you'd like to strengthen? Or maybe there's a certain thing about the model or scene that moved you more than anything else. Hope that helps.
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Mengu Gungor
Thank you Elias, that makes a lot of sense. Since I can focus on proportion, likeness, anatomy, during regular studio life drawing, I'll try to focus more on color and light next chance I get to paint a figure outdoors.
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Steve Lenze
Hey Mengu, These are nice paintings, plein air is pretty hard. I made a few notes that I hope will help. Keep up the good work :)
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Mengu Gungor
Thank you so much for the always valuable feedback Steve. That little sign that's drawing the eye away was something I should have addressed, but talked myself into leaving as is... It was in my initial 3-value study and made sense to balance the left side, but doesn't really serve the final image. I should have brought the value way down to something closer to other values around it, and left it as a hue change only for interest. Thank you.
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