About 6 hours in now, and we’ve got a contour.

I think a bug landed on the big toe as I took the picture. Next up: shading block-ins and base tones. And then a lot of informed refining.

I thought this one was going to be easier than the last on first look, but I realize now it won’t be. The forms are a lot rounder, and the underside of the foot has fewer subcutaneous landmarks than the top (or, I guess I should say, the planar [...]

First Daily Doodle in what, six months? Ah well.

No, I’m supposed to be studying feet. And I am studying feet. I just learned about the peroneus tertius, for instance, and how the tibialis posterior and toe flexors would more accurately be described as hooking under the back of the [...]

Bargue plate 9 is next. Where this blank piece of paper is tonight, in a few weeks, will hopefully be something that shows that I completely understand what the underside of a foot looks like.

And this means, again, first going back and really studying the underlying anatomy. This stuff [...]

The purpose of this would take longer to explain than I’ve got time for right now, but I need to test some properties of oil paints, especially dark colors, when thinned. Tonight I took all of the colors in Graydon’s “color kit” for mixing, and put down opaque swatches [...]

Sometimes I don’t really understand 3-dimensional objects without being able to actually handle them, turn them over and around, and process some tactile information in addition to visual. Anatomy books are great, essential, but it really helps to have some models too.

This is a $17 model of a foot [...]

This one’s just about done. A little more darkening and smoothing here and there, and I’ll be happy. I do think this one came out a bit better than the previous one.

My guess is I spent around 40 hours or so on this one, including a lot of study [...]

Boy… you spend a few days on the contour of a Bargue plate, you work it back and forth and adjust it and tweak it and look at it in mirrors and refine and refine and refine until you’re really confident in it, and then you think the work [...]

Back at it after a 3-day weekend… still hoping to finish this by the end of the week. Tonight I did the last round of contour correction, rotating the board through all 90° positions for comparative analysis… found a few errors in the base and in the [...]

A milestone in the Bargue process is committing the contour. After three or four sessions of observing, refining and moving from block- ins to curves, it’s time to take the big gulp and decide on the final contour line. This is the point of switching from vine charcoal to [...]