Hello and good evening,

The past week has been full off stuffs to do, among them packing and going to Norway for a few weeks.
Because of this I haven't had much time for painting or for writing my steemit, but now things have finally slowed down a bit!:)

Today I found a lot of old paintings from a few years back when I first started painting with oil paint. It's so fascinating to see the progress I have made the past few years. It really is encouraging to see that practise and time really does pay off, even thou I sometimes feel like I'm standing still...

I thought it would be fun to put a few of my earliest self portrait attempts together with some of my more recent ones and talk a bit about what went on in my head at the time.

1.

2010 vs. 2015

The painting to the left was painted in 2010. I just started The Florence Academy of Art and even thou I only drew the first year at the school I was spending some of my spare time dabbing in grisaille painting. It was painted with black, white and raw umber. I mainly wanted to practice value and drawing in this painting and remember it took me several evenings to be able to get it to a place where I was somewhat happy with it.. Looking at it now I have to laugh a bit... I do remember someone telling me that if you painted a really good grisaille you could fool someone to think they actually saw skincolor.. well.. I guess my choice of raw umber and the quantity of it made this skincolor look more like a zombie.. corpse.. very sick person, hahah..
In this painting I also focused a lot on big value relationships and I remember I just discovered the effect of highlights, hence the big one on my nose..

The second painting from 2015 ( This is a cropped closeup), took me a couple of days all in all and was also painted with simplification in mind. Looking at the two together to me the clearest improvement lies in the drawing, then the value and then the color. Looking at the two I also remember how hard I thought it was to get the oilpaint under control and how, on the second painting manipulating it was a lot more easy and fun!

2.

2011 vs. 2016

Oh my god... I remember this little self portrait sketch I made back in 2011.. I was SO proud.. heheh.. Even thou the drawing is completely off, I remember having so much fun! I just started painting with a limited color palette and I thought mixing skincolors was the best thing I ever did.. I also remember discovering more brushy realist painters like Zorn and Sargent and loving what I found wanted to be able to do exactly what they did. In like, a year, haha! Well I soon realized that was NOT going to happen.
I also understood that before they where able to be loose, shapy and brushy they had mastered an enormous understanding of form, light and color.

3.

2011 vs. 2015

Later in the year of 2011 after mixing a lot of skincolors I started to understand the importance of warms AND cools. I did however have the hardest time putting them next to each other without making it look dirty. What tends to happen is that the colder colors go back and the warmer comes towards you so one needs to be mindful of this when building the form. At this stage I was also very obsessed with planes and shapes, but I wasn't too good at putting the together, so the light doesn't fall smoothly over the form.

In the painting from 2015 I actually think, looking at it now I would have benefitted from introducing more cools and planes than I have.

I actually think there is a lot to be learnt from student work. One goes so very into every new stage that it can be a good reminder to help one stay mindful of the tools and consepts available.

I do think I will start refering more to earlier works in general. To remind my self of the tools, the process and also to remind myself of even thou I have come a long way since my first paintings there is still a long way to go! The first painting was 7 years ago, looking at it makes me happy. It makes me think what I might achive if I work as hard as I have so far in another 7 years time!

Hope you all had a good weekend! :)