New class

I started a new class today, with Emma Petitt from the Kara Bullock Art School. It's waaaaay out of my wheelhouse, except for the fact that it's portraits and, as Emma says in her intro, she's not painting portraits so much as women, because her goal isn't for the picture to necessarily look like the model but to simply be a good painting. We work BIG, we draw first in charcoal, and the paint is acrylic, applied in sweeping messy strokes with a big flat brush. Pretty much the opposite of what I've been doing for the past however many years.

I'm enjoying it! I like the brushwork showing, I like the ability to layer in a different way, and I like not worrying so much about each stroke I make on the page. It gives a feeling of abandon. I don't like worrying that my loaded paintbrush will dry out lickety-split—you can't just "swish" it a couple of times to clean it like you do with watercolor, you have to wash it OUT. But I guess I'll get used to it, along with not being able to reconstitute the paint....

For this first exercise, we drew in charcoal, including all the lines that define the planes of the face so as to get a sense of the 3-Dness of it. Then we painted in just four colors—turquoise, a brick red, white, and a bit of Payne's Grey. We focused on finding the shadows and planes and edges, and defined them first with turquoise, then with red, and then went over the top with white to make or restore highlights. The Payne's Grey was primarily to create eyeballs, eyebrows, nostrils, and that tiny gap between the lips.

In Emma's more sophisticated work, she first creates an abstract background of colors and shapes, then draws over the top of it to create the portrait, letting some of the background colors come through while imposing others in some areas. I'm looking forward to mastering this technique!

This took me about two hours, start to finish.

Lesson One EP—charcoal, acrylic paints, Stabilo All pencil, on Strathmore watercolor paper, approximately 16x20.