Let’s just finish up Alice here. I didn’t really plan to make this a thing, but I thought I should finish it up a bit more.

Going to need more practice on this black-into-white method… it seems like if you’re going to do it this way, you need to put down a mix of black [...]

I’m not updating as frequently recently mostly because the workflow of image-from-camera-to-web isn’t quite as smooth now with the new camera and Aperture. Still working out the kinks. I don’t like how Aperture doesn’t seem to want you messing with your actual files… it does presume that it’s going to take ownership of the organizational [...]

This is a head and hands study I did over the weekend for the long-pose figure session we’re working on. From (draped) reference photos we took for explicitly this purpose.

Too bad the actual head and hands in the final piece will be about 1/10 this size. Maybe I should be more ambitious size-wise in the [...]

… or so. Give or take a couple.

No blending on this one (so far); going to try just gently building up the halftones with a 2B, and the lights with a B, and see how it develops.

This one has been on the easel far too long. Simply put: I need both the easel and the space presently occupied by the cast for other projects. It’s time to acknowledge that it is what it is; it isn’t quite what I’d hoped it would be, but I learned a few things along the [...]

Feast your eyes. This is around 5 hours work, I’m guessing. A constellation of barely-visible dots, marking key points of intersection, checked and cross-checked and re-cross-checked. This is how they begin. It is very slow work.

Doing them is actually physically painful for me at this stage particularly, because the measuring has to be so precise [...]

Again, I start out intending to just do legs (which I did in the gestures and the 10-minute, not shown), and end up getting re-tempted back to the whole figure.

Basically, there were a couple of good starts here, which could potentially have become nice pieces if I had 40 hours to work on them instead [...]

Second in this series. I’m not quite sure this is done, but they’re studies, and I think I got the key elements I was after here. One or two more in this series at 9×12″, then I’ll plan out the full-sized one.

Did this one on the smooth side of the paper with a lot of [...]

…mostly

I think this one is about done. Finished the brush blending and overall tone balancing, and I’m feeling pretty good about it. There remains the issue of the large open spaces of the quadriceps area and the peroneus/extensors area of the lower leg, and if I have a wave of bravery, maybe I’ll lay down [...]