Lesson #1 again

I decided today to repeat Lesson #1, not wanting to go on quickly and thereby miss something important. So I listened to parts of the videos again, and did a new one. But honestly, I think I did better the first time—I got too "itsy" with the brushwork this time around and tried for small details I should have just ignored.

That's probably because I switched models, just for fun, and chose a girl I had painted before. This set me up to try to make this one a good portrait instead of just a woman's face, as Emma said we should be doing. I'll know better next time. Still having fun with this method, however.

Here is today's, in charcoal and acrylic:

And here's the version I did of Fionnula before, in Uniball and watercolor, with a stencil background:

Draw and Talk

Nate and Salli from the "theydraw" community/website (formerly theydrawandtravel and theydrawandcook) are hosting "Draw and Talk" sessions for an hour on occasional Thursday mornings, and what fun it is. They come up with a topic; show examples from their database of recipes and travel maps; and then put something onscreen for us to draw while we discuss various aspects of this kind of project. Then we share (if we want to) what we have drawn.

Today's topic was "still life," and it was a fun one. I only managed to draw a small percentage of the stuff that was on screen, but that was sort of the point: Pick out what resonates for you, arrange it in any way you see fit, and put it together.

I am always blown away by both the skill and speed of the many professional illustrators in this community; while I painstakingly did my contour drawing of the few objects I selected from the many, and then added some watercolor, some of them were creating virtually finished pieces either by hand or on their iPads. But as we are reminded each time we do these, it's not about competition, it's about finding our own unique way to represent what's in front of us.

So, here's my humble effort:

And here is the original screenshot of what was on offer. I might come back later and try this again, adding in some elements like those great wooden spoons and platter and that weird pitcher in the background.

There will be a "gallery" of what people did, later today or tomorrow, on Instagram. If I can get the link, I'll post it here.

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.