Making art, for Becoming who? I am

I have been painting now almost daily since January, mainly trying to improve my understanding of colour and values, improve my drawing, and portraits. I am working on paintings for an exhibition which I am going to call "Becoming who? I am" The theme is going to be the development of my work and showing my technical progress, as well as the subjects I am interested in painting.

I showed a professional fine artist my work in January and he told me to try and work more from live models and still life, and less from photographs. So I have concentrated on this during February, getting people to sit for me, and also comparing what I have painted to a photograph.

I watched a DVD instruction on gesture portraits; quick 30-45 minute paintings without too much thought to capturing the likeness, by Jeff Watts, and then discovered Ben Lustenhouwer from you tube. He is a Dutch portrait artist who has some great downloadable video instruction. I followed his instruction on premixing skin tones and testing them against a photograph.

Here is an example of a gesture portrait of a friend, painted in February, after the manner of Jeff Watts,

 followed by a 2 hour portrait painted later from a photograph taken at the time of sitting.