Timed paintings

So this week our professor had us do 8 paintings with a time constraint on each.  Normally the professors are asking us to spend at least 6 hours on a painting, this week we were allowed to spend only 45 minutes on one group and no more than 60 minutes on the next group.  The point of the exercise was to hone our skills at capturing the gesture of the pose, seeing large shapes and massing them in quickly, and making color choices quickly.  The academy provided us with photo references to work from and I used a timer to keep myself on track.  I generally set my timer for 5 minutes less than the allotted time and then when it went off I knew I had 5 minutes left to do the last minute details. It was really quite hard, but after a while I began to enjoy it.  I can really see how it helps your eyes to see and evaluate what you are looking at quickly and to take a lot of information and simplify it so you can describe it with paint.

Here are a few of my not so scary looking paintings that I did.  Some were really quite horrific!!! But a few had promise, so I thought I'd post.  Enjoy!