Four more hours of work and change. We're going to do one more day tomorrow, so it'll be a total of 20 hours. Here's where it is after 16.

I got more "I wouldn't have the patience for that" comments today. I kind of like those.

Really, this is pretty close to done, but I'll work more on fine- tuning values tomorrow, and I may lightly pencil in the divan she's lying on, but not in any detail. I want to keep the focus on the figure and I like the light-dark balance along the diagonal.

This is easily the most successful figure drawing I've ever done, and that should be no surprise because I've worked on it far more than on any other I've ever done. I'm really pretty hooked on this process now. It's very hard to imagine going back to 40-minute poses anytime soon.

We might get one more day if the model is still available. I could use it.

I must admit, however, I'm pretty happy with how this is coming along so far. 12 hours in now. Today I bore down and spent an hour each on the hand, the foot, the left leg, and probably 45 minutes on the likeness. Tomorrow I'll do the right leg and the abdomen, and then continue working the face and hair, and then start in with highlights and overall tone-balancing.

In day two of a four-day, 16-hour pose. I could have posted last night, but there wasn't much to show... just some foundation lines for this, which is where it was after the 6th one-hour session. It's a bit further along now, but this is a better image.

Yes, that's six hours of work. A lot of very tedious work sight- sizing with calipers. The drawing is around 20'' wide, I'd guess, as seen from about 8 feet back. It takes a very long time to build up the foundation this way, and again, takes a lot of patience. I feel like it's paying off, though.

We have a terrific model for this - she's very good about getting back into position and holding the pose well. She's a rock. Even with the best of all of our efforts, though, there are always slight variations from pose to pose - a slightly different arch in the spine, hand or facial expression a little different from the previous one, so this will still end up being an amalgam of all of the sessions. That's fine, and makes it a more creative process than just working from a photograph by itself.

I'm going to be printing images of her face, hand and foot, however, and blowing those up for reference since I can't see enough detail to do convincing renderings from the distance I'm at.

We're halfway done; two days down, two more to go, and I can't wait to see what it looks like on Wednesday.

A friend made me a pair of calipers, which I've been wanting to try as an alternative to the knitting-needles-and-thread materials for measuring and comparing at arm's length, and boy are they easier to use. I was able to make a couple of minor but important corrections in the form, and get on to the drapery.

I'd guess I'm between 6 and 8 hours in at this point. Not a lot to show for it so far, right? Well, right. This is a slow process. But at this point, I'm feeling pretty good about the contour and pretty confident in the proportions. I tacked the drapery back into place on the left side of the image, so the statue will contrast against it and it won't sag again, and blocked in the major contours. I'll take one more look at this tomorrow, then shade in the major dark areas in vine, do one last proportion check, and then start going in with the dark charcoal pencil and setting up the value range.

...by my Tetris "Ultra" skills. Do not attempt to beat this score, because you cannot.

This is a 3-minute game: 44 lines, 18,998 points. The lines are all four-blocks: yes, eleven four-blocks in 180 seconds. Just give up now.

(No time to work on the cast today or tonight; more tomorrow)

A few more hours into this thing. The outline / contour is now close enough that I can't tell what to fix, although I know it's not quite right, so it's time to start finding the "bedbug line" of shadow inside the figure. This leads to further corrections through observations of negative shape.

I'll look this over again tomorrow, and then proceed to actually shading in the shadows in flat blocks and further refining the contours as needed.

The beginning stages of this kind of drawing are very, very trying... you can be six hours in and only looking at a couple of faint lines. But when you have them right, the figure can actually look very pleasing even in such a skeletal - so to speak - stage of the drawing. Things are starting to pick up a little now... more judgements by eye and fewer by measuring with thread. The rest of this should be fun.

I also notice that the drapery has settled since I first set it up, so my preliminary lines for it are no longer correct and will have to come off, but that's no big deal. I just hope it doesn't fall behind her right elbow... it's pretty close now, and we don't want tangents, a major compositional no-no. If that happens, I'll have to try to pull it back out again.

Next project, over the next few days or week (or two), will be a proper cast drawing. I still haven't really done one, and I went to all the trouble to get the lighting in my studio set up and build a proper sight-size setup, and I have these casts I've spent actual money on just lying around, and why the fzzk haven't I done anything with them yet?

So the first is underway. For good measure, I'm adding some drapery, since I've realized recently that my drapery skills are especially weak and need some serious attention.

Doing it old-school, the hard way: by eye, no mechanical aides, just incredibly careful measuring and painstakingly slow progress. This method is not for the impatient or attention-deprived. I'd say I've put about four hours into this so far, and have now arrived at a rough outline, which I am ready to begin to check and correct over the next however many hours it will take. Then gradual block-in of shadows, and then more checking, and then I'll begin actual shading. This is on green Hannemüule paper, which feels very soft so I'm having to be very gentle with the kneaded eraser, but I'm hoping it will give nice results, and I'll also try it on the long-pose figure drawing next week.

Strictly speaking, classical cast drawing is usually done on a neutral white or cream-colored paper, and only in black or red charcoal (no white), so I'm deviating from that a little, aiming more for a Prud'hon style. Apart from that, it's pretty much exactly as described in the academic texts. Standing about 6 feet back from the setup (with points marked on the floor), measuring proportions and lengths with thread held between two hands fully outstretched, making the decision about where a mark goes, walking forward and placing the mark without looking at the cast, walking back to the marked point and checking to see how close I got, going back in to correct as needed every time until it's all correct.

I find holding my hands steady at arms length to be extremely difficult... so hard that at one point I gave it up as a method, figuring that my ability to do that is only going to decline with age and that I should use technology to assist me in some method. Then I felt guilty. I should at least give it my very best shot before deciding that it doesn't work.

When the drawing is done, I may very well try Donato's transfer technique to affix a high-quality copy to masonite, and then seal it down and paint it, for practice painting as well.

Swampfox is right, of course.

OK, here's one.

With my head needing to make a sharp return to the cognitive reality I inhabit for the purposes of paying the mortgage, it's interesting to metacognitively watch the transition.

The process of trying to become a better artist is hugely exciting most of the time, but is accompanied by steady pain. I know that I'm my own worst critic, and that fear of this inner critic is what made me put the pencils down around age 12 and not pick them up again until 37, old enough and desperate enough not care anymore. I can never get that quarter-century back, so that lends a fresh urgency to everything I try to do now... the clock is ticking on my own mortality in a way I could never perceive before what there's no avoiding confessing is at least a biological middle age (even if it doesn't feel like one in any other sense).

As I was in the earlier stages of learning, it was like walking forward in a heavy fog. I couldn't see very far ahead of me in terms of being able to perceive where I was headed and where I needed to go. This was before I started school, and before I gained real personal exposure to great painters. In school, I did start to get some concrete senses of the distances I was trying to traverse, and over the past year, I've been fortunate enough to study personally with some of the world's best painters, in the fantasy / sci-fi world (through the Illustration Master Class), and more recently among the avant-guard of "classical realism" (for want of a better term) among the folks at rationalpainting.org, led by Graydon Parrish, whom I consider the best artist walking the planet today, and whom I have the incredible fortune of being able to study with personally at intervals that will never be close enough.

The effect of this proximity to ability that is so far beyond mine is a dizzying sensation of a sudden clearing of this thick fog, revealing an immense, planet-wide landscape before me that needs to be crossed, a journey that will take a lifetime. This is a wonderful thing. However, this renewed knowledge of the gulf between where I am and where I want to be is a kind of revisitation of the inner critic that shut down my 12-year-old self. I can't look at my own work next to that of the artists I've studied with and see anything other than cringe-inducing indicators of painful amateurism, even after 5 years of serious study (when not at the day job at least). In engineering, bootstrapping yourself into new areas of knowledge isn't hard once you've done it once: you figure out what you need to know, you gather your reference materials and set up a place to do exercises, and you go right after it in concrete, quantifiable steps until you're there. Art doesn't work that way. What you want to do can be in plain sight right in front of you, but the steps to get there can't be enumerated in a checklist, procedural format. And so I press hard towards my destination, but my work still contains all of the marks of amateurism that I can see plainly, but still don't seem able to discard.

It takes a lot of faith and courage to expose that work here. I know that the artists I study with and admire have done hundreds, if not thousands, of paintings over decades of work, and mine below is, if you count my homework from the past year, maybe my 15th painting overall (and maybe my 3rd or 4th if you don't), and so it's irrational and absurd to expect to suddenly leap to the levels of my instructors just because I've been exposed to their work close at hand and learned from them personally. But still, it's hard not to be cowed by that ageless inner critic. I know the work below is filled with embarrassing sign after embarrassing sign of amateurism, despite the full weight of everything in me I could throw at it to try to make it good. I do have faith that continued effort will produce improvement over time. But this clearing of the fog, being able to see clearly into the immense distance I yearn to cross, often makes me feel very, very small.

My back is a painful tangle of frayed muscles after four days of standing tensely at an easel. The day job awaits. But when I get home, I'm busting out the paints and getting on with charting up my Munsell values and getting my color wheel done, and I have chroma spheres to finish, among about a dozen other pending things, and there's long-pose figure drawing (FINALLY) on deck, and hopefully another round of study with Graydon to start preparing for.

Onwards.

And that's a wrap.

Last night I was working towards the finish, and at around 11pm I wanted to work the profile a little more and see if I could improve the likeness at all; I wasn't very happy with it. A tiny voice in my head said "don't f**k with it. You're too tired." I didn't listen, and set in to work, and by 2am I had just about ruined it. At this point I was leaning in with a 10×0 brush, looking at it and my reference through a magnifying glass, trying to make corrections to proportion and pigment color in microscopic amounts that were having huge effects on the image. It was monstrously frustrating and I wanted to put my head through the board. Overall I felt like a lot about the piece was working well, but without a decent face on the central figure, little else mattered, at that point at least.

One of my classmates pointed out a couple of problems with fresh eyes; the nose was slightly too small, which was making the proportion of the upper lip too large, which made her look like she was scowling. Also, I hadn't modeled the brow line correctly or the planes of the skull as the zygomatic turns into the temporalis. I had deviated from my reference a bit and the shadows were wrong, and the light color was wrong, and it wasn't working.

After five hours sleep, I attacked it again this morning, corrected the nose proportions and tried to get the right color for the lips, and it improved enough that I no longer wanted to throw it out the window, although I'm still not happy with it. Still, there it is. For now, at least.

Overall, I feel like I did the best I could with the time I had, did a lot better than last year (when I didn't finish), and did have some successes with this one. I like the composition and its theme; I'm pretty happy with the chroma control and perspective, and the six hours I spent mixing the blues used in the sky and water were expensive given the constraints I was under on day five, and probably not tactically very smart in that sense, but I'm very happy with the colors I got, and I have plenty left over and tubed up for future paintings.

Faults I see include the face still not being right in a variety of ways, the drapery being pretty awful (and something I intend to focus on a lot in the coming months), the boat being kind of ordinary and not sitting quite right in terms of value on the water, and the tree above and behind her being pretty rudimentary. I think it's worth revisiting all of this, and I might either work on it more or repaint it, but I need to get away from it for a little while first.

Overall it was another incredible week. Exhausting - I'm on about five straight days of six hours sleep, which I do not handle well anymore, and I still have a jar of oily brushes to clean before turning in tonight. And back to the day job immediately first thing in the morning. Gah. But I have lots of things to work on, and am looking forward to taking an even bigger swing at it next year.