Portraits - Seven: #4 wk 1

I'm not sure if I have a photo from day 1 of this painting. If I knew where one was, I wouldn't try to substitute yet another "word-picture." Enjoy! This is the best blog!
The model is a short, roundish middle-aged woman with long, thin hair and glasses. She is my favorite model so far because she holds herself very still and resumes the exact same position after her breaks. She had been asked to come up with a theatrical or dramatic pose, so she brought a cane along--she took her seat as if it were a throne, and rested her hands on the cane as though it were a scepter, and she did a Queen Victoria moue thing with her mouth.

Drawing - Six:

Drawing NYC - Four:

Portraits - Six: Third One

This is Week 2 for the painting described below (last wk).

I forgot to write down her name. It doesn't really look like her anyway.

Drawing - Five:

Drawing NYC - Three:

Portraits - Five: "warm underpainting" homework + starting portrait 3

I think I took a snapshot of this, maybe on my phone. So photo TK, maybe. I don't know where I put the homework. Some blog, huh?

Here's what you missed so far: the model is seated on a platform slightly above us. She is pretty. She is lit from below. It is already too hard and I want to stop and go home. She has a prominent nose and chin, so they cast shadows upward on her face. I should've pushed the Toulouse-Lautrec-ishness, but I'm more at the slavish copying-stage of my artistic development, and I let the competing fluorescent lighting on my side of the room cancel out most of those shadows and sap out the drama. That's also what the bright white reflections around her cheekbone are supposed to be about. No, those aren't whiskers, they're what remain of the dramatic footlights! Same thing with the uni-brow. See you next wk.

Drawing - Four:

Drawing NYC: No Class

Happy Columbus Day!

Portraits: No Class

Yom Kippur!

Drawing - Three:

Drawing NYC - Two: Cancelled!!

I waited at Grand Central for a little while, then I went home.

Portraits - Four: Painting #2 "Rich"

I learned the model's name this time.
His hair is actually black and his lips are very red, but I'm not slick enough to handle all that without making it look like eyebrow liner and lipstick. I wiped it off and made everything light brownish. Cop out.

I spent most of my painting time on the nose and eyes--I didn't get back to finishing a lot of what I'd hoped to do, but the nose really needed the work. Our nose painting homework from last week helped a lot, but I still had trouble figuring out what I was seeing from 20 ft away. At the end of the night, my teacher walked by and said, "there's a dark red line running here 1/4 inch along the inside line of the nose--can you see it?" He scumbled it in for me, and then said, "and there's a light blue line just to the left of the red, along the edge of the nose, and to the other side of the red line, there are about 6 shades of flesh that make the curve of the bridge down to the cheek. Can't you see them on the model?" I stared and stared and stared and I couldn't see anything like he was describing, but then between one blink and the next--I'm either the most suggestible person in the world, or I had been the most oblivious--the colors on his nose transformed into a light blue line edge, followed by a dark red line that hadn't been there a second ago, and then the various light oranges and pinks. Weird. So that's how you paint a nose.