Caricatures Rowdy Ronda and H-bomb Henderson

Carrying on from previous mma caricatures I decided to draw the UFC's current women's bantamweight champ 'Rowdy ' Ronda Rousey. She's arguably the most popular and recognisable MMA fighter at the moment and that includes when standing by her male counterparts. Rousey is a medallist in the Olympics for judo and fans gave her the nick name 'Arm collector' as she finished her first 11 bouts (amateur and professional) by armlock. Her 'Rowdy' nickname came from love of pro wrestling and she asked Rowdy Roddy Piper if she took the same nick name.   

Next to Rousey is Dan Henderson, a two time Olympian in wrestling. Henderson has an impressive fight record and won some of the most notable championships.At 44 he's still extremely dangerous. He's had many nicknames in the past, 'Dangerous', 'Hollywood', 'Decision' and recently just Hendo. He has an iron jaw and explosive right hand. Due to this his fans have nicked named his right hand 'H-Bomb'.

Ronda is probably be the last one I'll colour on computer for the fighters. I wanted to concentrate on watercolour as seen on the Hendo piece. I have a few caricatures to do for an old friend and needed the final artwork to be coloured for framing. They're work in progress at the moment but can be seen below.

Oxford art comp - oils part 2

 

It's all slowly moving along now and I think I'm starting to establish a sense of depth with the painting. The building's are starting to look more solid and the recent visit to the museum allowed me to make some corrections to the path in the front of the museum (as it was originally obscured by parked cars) and to figure out the foliage on the far right. I'll most likely need to make a few more visits as the painting progresses.

This is about 17 hours of work so far.

 

For now, It's time for a break and put this on hold while I get on with some caricature work.

 

 

Oxford art comp - oils part 1

 

 

I spent a few hours yesterday working in the sky and the furthest buildings and trees. I was very tentative so didn't get as much done as I had hoped. I'm fairly happy with the building but it's the trees by it I struggled with. I couldn't find a way of painting the distant trees that I was happy with.

 

 

 

So today I went back to the museum to look at the trees, the ones furthest away, the big tree in the middle and the foliage for the foreground. I also looked at the lower left of the building and ice cream cart as it was blocked by cars on the day I started painting. It was still obscured by cars though.

 

The sketches can be seen here and were very quickly done but I think it'll help me when I tackle the tree and foreground foliage just because it gave me an ideal of how the twigs and branches hang from the trunk.  

Oxford art comp ( work in progress)

With the trip to Lancaster Comics Day and meeting about how to possibly progress with the 299 book out of the way I finally found time to continue a little more on the painting of the university museum.

 

It's looking pretty rough at the moment. Some of the details from before were a bit faint and I felt I had to add a bit more detail and shadows before breaking out the oils.

 I find I'm working a little more hesitantly compared to when I paint animals or people, perhaps it's the lack of familiarity with painting buildings.

 

Time wise it's taken about ten hours in total to get to this stage of painting( 6hrs from day one and 4 hrs today) and that's not including the sketchbook work in preparation to tackling this.

 

 

.

Oxford Art Prize- unfinished

For this competition I thought I'd work in my most comfortable medium, which is oils. However due to the extended drying time I thought it'd be wise to begin in a faster drying medium such as acrylic. I didn't want to take a wet painting onto the bus.

 
This is my unfinished effort for the day of the competition. I got to the site fairly early and managed to get my first choice of where I wanted to draw from. The prep work to determine where I wanted to draw from can be seen on my facebook page. This is almost 6 hours of work.

 About 3.5 hrs of measuring and pencil lines before the last 2.5 hrs going over with thin acrylic paint. This way I won't lose the detail before I start adding colour as pencil lines on primed surfaces tend to smudge and disappear very easily.

 I pretty happy with the painting although parts of it looks a little empty. This is because I  left out the foliage of the centre tree and the foliage from the trees on the right. I just didn't think I needed to add them in at this stage. I felt the details I need before adding colour are now in place.