Sean: ASL, Dec 2

oil on panel, 12x16

Donna -- ASL Figure Painting: July 27 - 31

I like to paint Donna--she smiles a little while she's posing. It makes me wonder what she's thinking about.

16x20 canvas paper
18x24 canvas board

18x24 canvas board

16x12 oil on panel


So far, my 3 favorite pictures have been the 3 I've tried on panel.

ASL Figure Painting: July 17

I think this is one of my favorite pictures. For me, this is the best likeness. Also, I like the way the paint surface looks over panel (vs cotton duck canvas). I started it near the end of class so I didn't have a chance to screw it up too much.

I've had trouble taking pictures of these paintings. For example, the painting above should be colored more like the picture below--any advice out there on how to make it happen without flash spots? Photographing purples is terrible. Worse than trying to mix them, even.


8x10, oil on panel

Helena--ASL Figure Painting: July 6 - 10

I think this one is a little better than the last. I need to remove that dark line under her chin.



Can't believe I've been doing this for more than a month already! I like painting in the mornings a lot. It's not time that I'd otherwise use wisely.

12x12, oil on panel

Portraits II: #2

Great model--I love the Manic Panic hair. She's a burlesque dancer under the stage name Dirty Martini, which surprised me only because she seems so petite. Really petite. I don't understand how her professional photographs make her look so zaftig.

I don't think I got a very good likeness--lost it in the eyes and couldn't fix it before we had to stop--but the longer it hangs drying on my wall, the more I like the look.

Drawing - Two: Collage

The conceit of this exercise is that it's an aerial landscape viewed from 1000 feet above. We're supposed to ignore fussy details in favor of composition/patterning. Not that I really understand what's going on!

We took one of our own keys and drew it, rotated the paper one turn and drew the key again, rotated the paper another turn and redrew the key, and so on.

Then we glued on junk and colored it! It's art, yo.

My teacher gathers detritus from the streets every single day. Every day. He says he has about 500 baggies full right now. Like whoa. And wow. He uses the storage baggie size and stuffs in all the day's treasures. He told me that he has zero personal interaction with anybody on the streets because his eyes are constantly scanning the ground. Lucky me. The stuff that was in my bag was SO GOOD. I flipped for that card tag with the string attached and had a "my precious, precious" moment. When he saw what I'd grabbed up, my teacher said that when he first saw the tag on the ground, he nearly had a stroke. That is the appropriate response.

Here are some of the baggie's contents scattered around me while I'm deciding what to glue on.

Drawing Class - Bonus Track: St. Patrick's Cathedral

Top, top quality camera phone again. I'm starting to like the greenish cast of the phone's pictures--good thing, too, because my the toy camera on my phone is turning into my primary photo supplier. Pathetic laziness.

It takes the very crummiest photos, but I'm using it almost non-stop. The ease outweighs the picture quality, until I look at the pictures. An iPhone would fix so much of my life. I'd settle for a better camera tucked inside my current phone [which I'm still fond of], or a small, light camera that always stayed charged in my bag.

I remember this night was freezing cold, so sharp and empty when you tried to breathe that the night seemed nearly airless. It was the best night for walking through the new year. Finally, a vacant hour and the expectation of a thousand like it! It seemed like the bare atmosphere barred regrets, like the accumulated weight of the past years couldn't chase me here through the dark thin nothing. Forward! Hope! That's the part I love about brutal January, esp at nighttime.

That came out florid and purple-y. I was shooting for technical-sounding. Oh who cares happy new year.

* * *

Two best memories from tonight:
1. There's a deli just north of St Pat's where I bought a grilled cheese sandwich during a break. The man who made it for me said, "It turned out PERFECT!"

2. My teacher said that what he liked about my drawing is it makes you wonder, "Am I in Heaven? or HELL?"
That's funny. Admit it. I thought it was so funny that I've pinned this drawing up on my bedroom wall for a reminder. I didn't even like this drawing before then.

Drawing Class - Week 7: Classmates "comic strip" with eerie hollow socket eyes.

The extremely horizontal format of this last Wednesday's drawing means that I don't have time to scan it in this afternoon and do the Photoshop merging. I'll probably scan it eventually because it's almost pointless to post oil pastel paintings you can't 'click' on to see the strokes close-up, and my digital camera can't capture that degree of detail. And it distorts the straight edges. Also, the scanner gives a more honest representation of the colors. For now, here's a photo for this week. (for all 4? 5? of you kind friends tracking my progress.)

These are a few of my classmates. We are seated in parallel rows, facing each other, drawing each other, and trying to be good models for each other by not moving too too much.

1. We were supposed to fold our paper into four horizontal sections and, in the first section, make an interesting composition with the figures' shapes, perhaps playing off their change in size as they get closer.

2. Second section: vary the composition, perhaps by radically changing the scale of the heads. The three figures here are the 3 left-most figures from the panel above.

3. Third section: make a third completely different composition, and, instead changing the scale again, perhaps by using the negative space in a different way, or perhaps some "other" way. (yeah, me neither.) I was mostly finished with this panel before I realized that all 3 of my panels were pretty much identical. Dang! I'd tried to start them out so differently on the left-hand side of the page, but by the time I got to the right side, I was back drawing the same thing.

4. Fourth section: I didn't know how to make a radically different or even mostly different composition, so I dropped my gaze a little and drew their torsos/drawing boards. Now I realize I should've looked lower and drawn their shoes, which would've been more interesting than a finished row of squarish boards.

5. Color: pick one section and add color to the entire section (not just a cropped section of it or partial color).

So--I think 'composition' was the object of the lesson, or composition-by-cropping. I'm still feeling really weak at composition, so way far lost that I don't really understand why I don't understand it.

One tiny comment my teacher made did help me a lot. I couldn't figure out which panel to choose for color and I was leaning toward the bottom one or the second one, but I didn't think the choice of any of these four made a difference one way or another. He said, "well, yes, it does. Your bottom panel would have too much brown wood, and the second panel would have too much of the same flesh color." So obvious, but in that moment, the coin finally dropped. It's like arranging colored shapes!

It was a long and frustrating night, but I had a Diet Coke to see me through the struggle and so by the end of the class, I was enjoying myself. I kind of like this one! The likenesses are pretty good and I'm feeling a lot more confident layering the oil pastels. Not confident enough to attempt drawing the lines for their eyes because I couldn't even make the pastels give me lines in the right places for their mouths, but just before I left class, I was starting to feel happy about the wall to the left of the purple door and about that center closet door because they turned out close to the colors I was trying to make. Progress! Also, it's easier/more fun to coax out their likenesses in the pastels than in pencil--I don't have to worry so much about mistakes or getting it wrong the first few times and making a mess with the eraser because I can keep layering and adjusting. Also, since you're working with color on the whole entire face instead of inventing arbitrary lines to represent the facial features, it's so much easier to tell if it looks like the person or not.

I like adding color more than drawing lines.

On separate occasions, I showed this drawing to Liesel and to my brother Rob, and they both said, with almost the same words and exactly the same happy intonation, "hey! you're drawing cartoons! a comic strip!" And both times, I was like, "no--cartoons? comics? what are you even talking about?" I see it, okay, I see it.

Drawing at the Met - Central Park

These are from the last day of class.
The tree is near the east end of the little Turtle Pond. I like this tree drawing. I never could draw a tree before. The building is Belvedere Castle from across the Pond. It was a hot day and I sat in the shade of a willow tree for both sketches.

Drawing at the Met - the yearning cow

This is a drawing from a painting is called Young Herdsman With Cows by Aelbert Cuyp. Obvs, I didn't quite get to the young herdsman. No time, no time.

Drawing at the Met - Rosa Bonheur painting

This is from a painting is called The Horse Fair. It's gigantic. I included my notes and practice sketch on the first page. The second drawing is unfinished, obviously. I kind of like the horse's hooves on that second sketch--by the time I got there I'd finally loosened up.

These drawings elicited a lot of unsolicited advice from passing tourists. I guess they thought I looked confused and squinty-eyed (well, I may have been), and wanted to help. I met a lot of people that morning.

Drawing at the Met - little head from Sri Lanka, 5th - 6th c.

it was only a few inches tall--I liked it, I liked drawing it, and I even liked the drawing

Drawing at the Met - Scholar's Garden

This is one of the drawings that I sort of like. I'm sitting under the porch and drawing the roof-line above me.