In progress

Here’s a pic­ture of what I’m work­ing on. It’s oil on can­vas, a lit­tle over five feet tall, so it stretches the lim­its of what I can put on my tri­pod easel. The pic­ture is pretty awful, because it’s hard to pho­to­graph an oil paint­ing this size with­out a lot of glare.

This is a com­mis­sioned piece. The cus­tomer wants a paint­ing of this pair of jeans (sup­plied by him) against a black back­ground. We went back and forth on the com­po­si­tion, even­tu­ally set­tling on mak­ing it look as if they were being worn by an invis­i­ble per­son. That entailed hir­ing a model to wear the jeans as I paint, since I’m pretty bad at work­ing from photos.

As you can see, I’m work­ing my way down. I mixed and tubed a base color and applied that as an ini­tial dead col­or­ing layer. I am work­ing on top of that. Right now, the jeans are hung in midair so that I can paint the inside parts. The cus­tomer wanted to cap­ture the iconic nature of Levis 501’s, so the inside tags—especially the one that will have a bright red 501 on it—are important.

I’ll try to post bet­ter pic­tures later on.

I like how it’s com­ing at the moment. In some ways this is an inter­est­ing and excit­ing project, and in oth­ers it will be really good to get this done, as it also rep­re­sents a block on my other work.