Craig Ford’s Fine-Art Blog
A multi-disciplinary, pop-art post-modern artist
Day of the Dead
October 21, 2012
So for the upcoming Mexican holiday Dia De Los Muertos, I volunteered to paint a panel that will later be assembled with other panels forming a mural of skulls to be displayed at Atlantic Station in Atlanta on the 4th of November. If you are in town for the event, see you there.
24″ x 24″ acrylic on board
NFS
Vermeer’s Pooch
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
I know that the great painter Johannes Vermeer has a small dog in a couple of his paintings. Although I don’t believe the dog is a chihuahua, a small terrier perhaps, when I saw this little dog’s face as captured in a photo I quickly saw a strong resemblance to one of Vermeer’s portrait’s of a young woman. The young woman is no dog, its just the direction of light on the face, the background that drops into darkness and the gaze of the eyes directly at the viewer are the commonalities in the paintings. And I do not claim to be in anywhere near the same league as the Dutch master. But I liked the title as it alludes to one of the best painters in history, in a sort of tongue in cheek fashion.
12″x 12″ oil on canvas
Highwire
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Here’s the second pen and ink drawing that was part of a newspaper ad campaign, of sorts, that included the earlier posted “Bailout”. Obviously we all walk some sort of metaphorical tight-rope in life, wouldn’t it be great if you knew you had a safety-net to catch yourself? What, you have no safety-net? What if there’s no god? Boy with questions like those, sounds like you need more insurance! That particular bit of text, while being a satire of the insurance company’s ad sales pitch, isn’t that far off the mark. Makes you wonder just how much the emotion fear is used to manipulate and sale things to everyone that gets scared. But it was a fun little illustration to draw; thought I need to end this post on a positive note.
Bailout
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Thought I’d add a an old pen & ink drawing I did a while back. This had been done for an insurance company, a person parachuting to safety. Funny how financial businesses often sell you on the idea of financial safety-nets, so called products to help ease the fall in unstable economic times that the financial industry manufactures for the most part. This particular drawing was done about twenty years ago during a recession that plagued the land caused by a minority who set policies the majority had to struggle through. Funny how some things never change. I should have the “sequel” to this little illustration posted next ‘cause with advert art this small, you can’t just make one.
pen & ink
overhead still-life
Saturday, April 21, 2012
I’m currently teaching a beginning drawing class. In the classroom is a large mirror suspended off the ceiling that allows you to see an overhead view of one’s subject matter. So I set up a still-life of objects on the floor underneath this mirror and had the students draw a bird’s-eye-view of the things I had arranged. While they were busy drawing away, I did a quick pen & ink sketch in my sketchbook, that can be seen below.
NFS
Sketch for Morpheus Passage
Saturday, April 21, 2012
I frequently do some thumbnail sketches of a composition I’m going to paint. In this case for my painting Morpheus Passage, I felt that I needed to do some sort of detail to try and determine how I was going to handle the light and tile shapes. While I had a photo for reference, as in most cases with my work, the enlarged piece of the photo that actually ends up being used as reference was very dark and murky. I had a general idea of what it could look but wanted to try and eliminate as much guesswork before I started painting. I hate when I think I have a nice image for reference and then when paint hits the canvas I realize I’m not sure what I’m painting. Anyway, below is a rough pen and ink that came in handy.
portrait of Jake
April 8, 2012
I’ve been teaching a pet portrait painting (gotta love alliteration) class at the local city arts center. When I approach doing
a dog or cat portrait, I go first for the eyes and the nose, getting those facial elements elements right makes all the difference
between capturing the pet’s likeness and personality. So to offer up a demonstration, I painted this portrait of a neighbors
medium sized dog, Jake.
Jake’s a mix of something that could be poodle or bichon or who knows. His owner found him deserted in a parking lot years
ago, with no tags or ID, so she brought him home.
Anyway as I was saying, I wanted to give a demo and what makes this a good subject is that the area around the eyes and nose
is just all this shaggy white hair that doesn’t require the tight accuracy the eyes and nose does. Just keep the proportions in check, the light/dark areas that help define shape and you can produce a very good likeness. One of the things I like best about Jake’s
face is that when he is looking up at you, his dark colored bottom lip shows through the light color fur and creates an effect that looks like a smile. I ended up painting this using one of these canvas pad tablets (instead of a pad of paper, its a pad of canvas sheets) as it was easily portable and fast to produce in a class situation.
12″x 16″ oil on canvas
NFS
I didn’t bother to paint the background, just left it the canvas white. Which worked well with this “white-furred” dog, the subtle yellows and grays in his fur had enough contrast to stand alone on the pure white canvas sketch pad.
portrait of Miki
April 8, 2012
We have a semi-feral cat that hangs out at our home. I say semi-feral as she only approaches us if we are sitting down being fairly motionless. She will get close enough to be petted or photographed as long as you have some food to offer up. And during one of these moments I was able to get a cell phone photo of her, that proved to be pretty good reference material for this 12″ x 12″ oil painting.
This painting went pretty fast or just seemed to go much quicker then similar pet portraits I done in the past. It definitely is more “painterly” in technique, but it looks just like her and I chose to leave well enough alone then to go back and tweak more detail into the image.
Miki has some of the greenest cat eyes I’ve ever seen, they seem to change depending on the light from a true green to a more blue-green. So I’m not sure I captured the true color but its what came across in the reference photo I worked from.
12″x 12″ oil on canvas
Four Cats
Monday, January 30, 2012
Well this latest painting is of my four indoor cats. With this painting I wanted to use one of the cats for each segment, which works nicely as each cat has it’s own distinct personality. I could have done a painting with all four combined into a large group portrait. But here I feel you get an idea of their individual dispositions. The different look in their eyes really conveys this.
My current series is of an allegorical nature, which this really isn’t a true part of although it definitely has the same compositional structure.
36″x 36″ oil on canvas
Morpheus Passage
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
My goal for 2011 was to get a series of at least ten paintings completed before the year came to a close. And I was able to accomplish this. I still need to keep painting more in this series and hopefully have enough to approach a gallery or some sort of representation.
36″x 36″ oil on canvas
This particular work was done to suggest a sort of dream state. A couple of the images are scenes that have reoccurred in dreams of mine, coastlines and dark, stony paths that lead to some unknown locale. The blue plant and the man’s face should convey serenity and fatigue, or something like that. As with all my paintings, make of them what you will.
Craig Ford’s Fine-Art Blog 