Time to get better at painting...

So portfolio was handed in last week! But I'm trying to keep my mind off that and focus a bit on other things now that I have so much free time...kind of. There's still an unfortunate amount of homework to do.

But one thing that I told myself that I would do this year was practice and become better at painting since I am terrible at it. So minimum 2 paintings a week, digital or traditional (preferably traditional), of anything as long as I get some sort of painting done. 

I had to paint 12 digital frames before reading week but I will save that for another post in a couple of weeks since the other half of that project isn't complete yet. Apart from that separate assignment, I attended extra life painting this past wednesday because I can sacrifice a day from life drawing now! 

I was going to just do tiny studies of the head/hands/body during my time there, it ended up becoming an exploration with colour. These may not be the most appealing paintings but I had fun playing around with colour and creating contrast with them and I think that's what is so successful about them:

After my first failure of a study I took a dive and worked with the terribly mixed skin tone I made and mixed in a bunch of colours along the way.

After working with neutral colours, I felt like working with warmer tones.

A monochrome study with a cooler colour. I thought you couldn't really tell what the entire figure was doing in the previous ones and decided to crop it instead.

The brown was the result of my first attempt at doing a tiny study, getting angry at the terribly mixed skin tone, then wiping the entire thing around out of anger. I came back to it at the end and did the head study, which I think turned out pretty neat.