Mike Stubbs Tutorial 20/02/2014

Enjoyed a very productive tutorial with Mike Stubbs this morning. Mike said he felt my figurative work at the moment didn't have a squidgy, fleshy feel to it, that the paintwork was too flat, too hard. We looked at the oil pastel sketch of my next work, and he pointed out how the pastel tones had a much greater sense of fleshyness than Skin-Flick. Likewise we also looked at some of my work from last year, & Mike pointed out how they had much more of a fleshy round appearance, which he feels is lost in my latest work.

A lot of what he said links in with Mel's comments on my skin-tones, and how she felt that they were not accurate, and that I should either embrace the overly pink tones I was creating, & make it a feature of my work, or really try to improve the accuracy of my rendering of fleshtones in my work. This is what I tried to do in Skin-Flick, to recreate skin as accurately as possible, and although I think to some extent I succeeded, [especially in comparison to previous pieces like Feed Me], the comedic element has been lost. Without doubt Skin-Flick is a cold work, especially when its compared to pieces like Transfat and Mother

We also looked at my Photoshop collages, which he was very enthusiastic about. I explained how I my final project was intended to be a mixture of both paintings, and prints of the collage pieces, & we discussed the importance & effect of their eventual framing for exhibition display.

Mike's feeling was that the solution is drawing, that I need to draw more, especially life drawing,