Clive Palmer digital caricature

Considered by some to be the current leader of the Australian Parliament, larger-than-life MP Clive Palmer is the subject of my latest caricature sketch.

Clive Palmer MP

Digital caricature sketch.
Original 1000x1000px

© 2014, Andy Dolphin

 

Despite some obvious features, Mr Palmer was surprisingly difficult to caricature.

This isn't exactly a finished piece, but it will do for now.


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Colin Barnett - AAA-rated caricature?

With the news today the Western Australian state budget has been so badly managed that our AAA credit rating has been downgraded, I thought I should repost a caricature I drew a few weeks ago.

Colin's a popular boy today.

Colin Barnett

Digital caricature. 580x680px

© 2013, Andy Dolphin

New approach - York Street in oil

Back in February, I entered a challenge set by US artist Terry Miura to paint a simplified version of a streetscape from a photo he supplied.

I chose to enter a digital painting, done in Photoshop, but it did whet my appetite for doing a streetscape of my own, in oils.

I used a primed board with a burnt sienna wash then followed the basic approach recommended by Terry – careful drawing, tonal map, transparent under-painting finishing with opaque paint.

You can see the gridded pencil drawing in this photo of the tonal map under-painting. The idea here is to simplify the image into three or four major tones. 

Then, (mostly) transparent colour was applied over the tonal map. Each area of colour is matched to the tone of the under-painting. Some minor adjustments have been made at this stage too.

  ( Summer Evening - York Street. 25x35cm oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

Here I've painted over almost all parts of the scene with opaque paint but I am still guided by the tones built up in the earlier stages. Again, I've made subtle changes to areas as I've seen fit, in particular reducing the size of the sunlit areas of road in the middle distance. I'm not certain that I've finished with this one yet. I'm going to live with it in a temporary frame for a while and see what happens.

The painting depicts the main street in Albany, a small coastal city just 50km from my home. It's a very different subject for me but one I'll be investigating further in the future.

Terry Miura is a tonalist so his paintings are essentially monochromatic in that they often have a single colour permeating every part of the painting – and his major focus is on contrasting areas of lights and darks. Local colour and temperature shifts still play a part but are subordinated in his work. Terry is also pushing himself toward being more abstract, so detail is implied rather than stated. The combination of these things results in exceptionally moody and atmospheric scenes.

I live almost 400km from the nearest major city and I'm surrounded by farmland. Down here in southern West Australia, the air is clear – visibility extends beyond 50km on a typical day and colours are saturated for most of the year. On top of this, I am strongly attracted to the interplay of warm and cool parts of a scene.

While I have followed Terry's basic approach, and while tonal contrast forms the foundation of my paintings, I lean toward colour and temperature contrasts rather than tone alone.

Sketching Bones

Once again it's time for something different.

This time it's a quick digital sketch of Emily Deschanel, better known as "Bones".

 (Deschanel "Bones" - digital sketch. 1000x1000px . © 2010, Andy Dolphin)

Porongurup in summer

I've headed out to the Porongurup region a few times this summer with camera and sketch book in hand. The logisitics of the region mean that photos are often easier and safer than sketches or on-site paintings since there's not much space on the side of the winding country road for safe parking - but it's a quiet road so there's usually enough time to snap a few photos before moving on.

I usually head out in the early evening to catch the last light of the day on the mountain range. On a good day the sky, mountains and farmlands take on spectacular hues. A few weeks ago I was there on just such a day.

(Summer's Eve, Porongurup, 2010. Oil on board, 70 x 37cm. © Andy Dolphin)

This is essentially a monochromatic work exploiting the warm evening light. The grass is dry and pale at his time of year so its colour is dictated mainly by the light it catches from the setting sun and the blues reflected into the dark shadow areas from the eastern sky. A subtle zig-zag pattern is created through the foreground ridges, mid-ground shadows and the slope of the range, helping to soften the strong horizontal band of trees.

My procedure for this, as with most of my work, was to do a small pencil sketch from the photo viewed on the computer monitor. I make colour notes on the sketch and use this as my painting reference. I re-check the original photo as the painting nears completion but I'm only looking at the overall impression, not detail. If it didn't stick in my head after sketching it then it's probably not important enough to put in the painting. That's why it's called "impressionism".

The Porongurup Range holds a veil of humidity not always apparent in the West Australian landscape. This enhances the aerial perspective with the peaks of the range are quickly sucked into the atmosphere as the light fades. This was an attempt to capture that effect.

A note of in interest: there were no sheep in this paddock that day but I put them in for a bit of additional interest and as a cool counterpoint to the overall warm tones. They bring a little of the blue sky down into the lower half of the scene.

This painting is entered into this year's Wagin Woolorama in March.