Blue guitarist lacks progress

I'm just getting to grips with this site - you can post once a week during the month, after Tuesday, a photo for the theme - and it must be linked back to Self Portrait Challenge. This time I'll report on the progress - or lack of - on the blue guitarist oil painting I started recently You might be able to see my stress in the photo! It's still basically an underpainting - decided I wasn't happy with the way I had changed the stance of the model from my original photograph (elsewhere on this site and on my flickr page) so I've been working on that. And I'll have to sort out where I want the left hand to be on the frets and finalise the actual guitar before I start the top layers. But that'll have to wait until I get my ICE collages completed.

If you haven't clicked one of the links yet, you can see more blue self portraits here.

Blue Guitarist oil painting

This is a real departure for me. Painting very large, in oils. It's based on a photograph I took of a musician (the photograph is one of the flickr slideshow showing on this blog). I'm streamlining him somewhat - changed the baggy jeans to tight ones. Changed his stance a little which has got me into trouble with the guitar but I'll get there in the end. So far I've stretched and gesso'ed the canvas, roughly drawn in my composition, and laid down thin layers of acrylic underpainting, and begun the layers of oil paint which I've never used before. I want it to be more abstract, but as usual I fiddle around and end up on a path to a realistic image while I'm laying in the building blocks of the painting. I need to leave the details alone for the moment. Once I've got the basic thing painted in oils, I'll see what I can do to jazz it up. The guitarist was standing in front of a large screen with music videos running silently and I caught this one with the female face floating there. The photographs I took that night were out of focus because I didn't want to use a flash - no atmosphere - and long exposure without a tripod and with the movement of the guitarist as he played doesn't make for a good clear photo But I liked some of the shots I got, especially this one, and with a friend offering the use of his studio for a week and having the space to paint big, thought I'd have a go at something different from my usual work. It's a brave thing I do posting a work in progress but it creates some pressure to continue to work on it.