Tonight was our last live session with Mayra. I’ve got a little more touching up to do on this one, but it’s close to done. About 9″ x 18″, charcoal and pastel on gray paper.

Next session will start in mid-August. I feel better about this one than the first two, and hopefully they’ll continue to improve as we do more of them.

This is more or less what you should expect if you go to see the Mona Lisa on a weekend in the summer.

It will take you an hour to get through the ticket line to get into the Louvre. Spend an extra euro and get your tickets at Virgin outside the entrance. It was at once maddening, and hugely refreshing, to be in such a crowd. I love the fact that 100,000 people were cramming their way into an art museum at once. There’s still hope. Even if all many of them want is a photo like this of the Mona Lisa from behind bulletproof glass and in front of a thousand people to prove they were there, it still means it has value to them. That’s good, it’s really good.

A bit farther along on this… still have some finishing to do in the face and hair, obviously, and the overall tones and some shadows still need balancing.

The trick is going to be to work this detail back into the figurative piece, at about 1/10 the size or smaller. Still, it’s very helpful to do side studies like this – you can work out a lot of problems in advance.

A separate head study of our current long-pose model. In progress, got a good ways to go yet. A few phases of rub down / resharpen in, still refining the facial shadows and forms, and the hair masses. Shoulder and hand are coming too.

(Note: no, “Mayra” is not her real name. I use aliases for my models now to protect their identity, unless they ask me not to.)

Another of Graydon Parrish’s teaching aides, which we made last time I was down for study, but we didn’t really have time to get to. I was complaining about my difficulties drawing hair. He said that hair can be simplified to ribbons in drawing and painting, and that a good way to practice drawing hair is to practice drawing ribbons.

Hair simplified to ribbons can do basically two things (besides lie more or less straight): wave, or twist.

I went down to the local crafts store and picked up a $3 glue gun and some cheap spools of ribbon in various hair-like colors, painted a board a neutral gray, and set them up. A coat or two of spray damar varnish helps them to hold their shape. Very easy to make, and I left some room for additional ones if I get any other ideas.

What is NOT easy is drawing them. I just tried to draw the first one on the left in plain charcoal, and boy did it turn out poorly. Toothy paper is one problem, if you’re trying to get that sheen (as I am), so I’m either going to have to blend or switch to a smoother paper. I’m not even sure, truthfully, what the best way to go about this is. My instinct has always been to pull the pencil/charcoal along the paper in the direction of the hair, but of course if you don’t vary the pressure, you get lines of a consistent value, which is the exact opposite of what you want. Drawing lines perpendicular to the direction of the hair would allow you to make consistent-value lines, but if any of the strokes are visible, it won’t look like hair because it’s drawing ACROSS the hair instead of down. It seems like either you need to be pulling the implement along the direction of the hair, varying the pressure carefully to achieve different values during the same stroke, or do a lot of hatching and blending. Since pressure-to-value doesn’t (really) work in painting, learning that way as preparation for painting probably isn’t the best plan. So, hatching and blending? I don’t know. Guess there’s only one way to find out.

Three sessions into the third long figure session with my local group. Taking this one slower.

Starting to build up the rough, general tone layer. Once this is all done, I’ll probably rub it down a bit and re-state the major forms, also working with a white or yellow for the lighter sections. One challenge here is that she’s actually against a much darker backdrop, so the shadows of her face are almost getting lost in the shadows of the background, but unless I render the background here (which I wasn’t planning to do), they’re going to be sharper since the value contrast is more. This means I’ll need to put in more definition than I can readily see. We’ll see if there are any consequences to that.

This session is costing me quite a bit more in modeling fees because we’re down to just two artists, sharing 3-hour session costs. Hopefully these things will start to sell one day so I can regard this time as an investment. Still, though, even if they don’t there’s really no other way to learn. School costs, books and materials cost, and models cost. Better to spend money on good materials and good models.

There is so much to learn.

My study to-do list is a mile long. On anatomy, I have to buckle down and learn the hand and forearm the way I learned the foot and lower leg last spring. I have several more Bargue plates to do just on hands and arms. I have painting exercises to begin (in moderation). I have several drawings that need starting and several more that need finishing. The next long-pose figure drawing gets underway tomorrow. I have scientific books on color to read and understand, casts to draw, studies of ribbon for modeling hair. Plus, my studio is a mess.

I spent much of the weekend trying to clean up the studio space a little. Little being the key word. By late afternoon Sunday, exhausted and hot, I didn’t feel able to tackle any of the above. I decided to just keep it simple just for the sake of trying to draw something – anything. I slapped down a cylinder and busted out the charcoal. When you’re overwhelmed, Just do something simple. And try to do it well.

Steve Armes did a nice demo on drawing a cylinder on his site. This is good practice for just slowing down and not trying to rush to finish, which I’ll need to do for the figure session. SLOW DOWN. Why do you expect that good things should come quickly? This cylinder drawing is around step 8 – of 18 – on Steve’s process. Probably around 90 minutes in at this point. The top ellipse probably took half of that time, and I’m still refining it. There’s still plenty to do.

Like in martial arts, music, and probably everything else, you can never have too many basics, or too much practice of them. When all else fails, fall back on them, and your time will be well spent.