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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

As in, I bought a lot of it on ebay.

My hope? That this is NOT a lifetime supply.

What it IS, is a lot of raw ingredients for continuing to mix and tube my Munsell colors.

So I’m just getting my head back on here after IMC 2010. It was a strong start and a weak finish, as I’ve documented: on the last day, I had to wipe out my entire painting and start over because the grisaille hadn’t dried (in the darks) and it was impossible to work on. I [...]

“Embrace failure” has been one of the memes of the week, mentioned in a few instructor lectures. I’m doing so in a big way today. After a mostly-sleepless night following a few days of futility, I just took a turp rag to the painting and wiped the whole thing off, back to the drawing layer. [...]

Not a lot to show today: the bulk of the day was spent dealing with copy shops, enlarging the drawing, matting it to plywood, dealing with the humidity and lack of sun, giving up and going to buy a fan to blast it dry, and waiting and waiting and waiting. It’ll be dry in the [...]