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 could have left it for a month and continued, but I needed to try to get something done by the end of the day, and so I made the hard decision to take the turp rag to it and start again. What you see here is what I managed to do starting again from the drawing, with no underpainting, in one day. It’s a long, long way from where I envisioned it, and of course it’s far from finished, and I cringe a bit at showing it in this state, but there it is.

Greg Manchess took some pity on me and started it off, throwing down some very chromatic colors on the face that I wouln’t have thought of myself, then handed me the brush and said “continue.” I tried to go on in his style, which was very different from how I would normally approach it: no underpainting, no value studies, no premixed strings: just tube primaries around the outside of a palette and mixing by eye, using more big blocks of somewhat impressionist color and sacrificing planning and precision (of color) for speed and action, which is what this class teaches, and what the quick-turnaround world of professional illustration requires. You can’t tell your publisher that your grisaille needs another month to dry when the piece is due in a few days.

So, there it is, as it was as late as I could stay up on the last day. I do intend to re-do this piece, starting over with my original concept and just trying to execute it better. Things I will do differently this time:

1. Get better plywood to mount it to. The grain of the plywood somehow came right through the cardstock paper mounted to it, which surprised me. I guess the glue of the matte medium really sucks the paper down tight to its surface, so any tiny bump on the surface really will come through. I either need to really sand these boards down, or get smoother ones, or go back to masonite.

2. Paint the grisaille in acrylics, not oils. And maybe go back to umber rather than black and white, if I can figure out how to handle the ranges of darks that are darker than the umber itself, which has always puzzled me.

3. Take the time to do a highly-finished drawing before starting painting. The 9×12 charcoal study had some problems that were more evident when blown up to 18×24, especially in the hands, and I should make sure everything is much clearer before sealing it down.

I may need to re-shoot some reference to try to solve some other lighting problems, and focus issues, but I do think what I have here compositionally and in the pose is good, and I want to stay with it… just do a much better job.

I complained to Graydon that I’m really not a very good painter, and he gave me the green light to work a little more weekly painting practice in with the drawing and anatomy study, which will be going on for a good long while still.

“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. Four days of hard work gone, but there was no salvaging it.

The grisaille layer never dried – or, more to the point, the blacks never dried, and the grays were still tacky. It was impossible to paint on. Even with enough cobalt drier to kill a horse, it didn’t even get close to drying, which surprised a lot of people. Maybe I laid it on too thick… I don’t know. If I had thought about it a little more, or maybe even just known a little more, I would have done the grisaille in acrylics instead of oils, which would have dried within an hour.

Last night I was trying to raise the chroma of a dim-purple shirt with undiluted cadmium orange and quinacridone red, both chroma 15 on the Munsell scale, and the black of the underpainting just devoured it with hardly a trace on the surface.

Nothing to be done. Wipe it down, and start over.

Yes, this is bitterly disappointing. I’m not going to be able to do very much in one day, and the truth is, the underdrawing still has some flaws that I should have corrected before I began, rather than just blowing up my value study, which was 1/4 the size. It hurts to wipe down the whole week’s work on the last day. No way to sweeten that. It stings something awful. Plus, I’m exhausted.

Still, there’s one day left, and I suppose I should still try to do the best I can with it. Simulating the monstrous looming deadline of the publishing world, which is the basic underlying structure of the IMC, isn’t as important to me because I’m not training for a job in the industry, and I know it doesn’t matter whether I complete a painting or not, but this had been by far my strongest start going in, and it looks like it’ll be my weakest finish.

Embrace failure. It makes you stronger. In 10 years, this will make a good story.

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 morning and ready for painting after a couple more coats by mid-day. In the meantime, I’ll do some small color studies.

Then a black-and-white value painting done with detail, and then we’ll pull color over it.

That’s the plan.

That’s right: my sketch was approved, with only some minor value adjustments. Rebecca cleared me to move to paint tomorrow. I’ll enlarge the 9×12 drawing to 18×24 and mount it to the plywood board, and I could potentially be starting a value underpainting tomorrow night if it dries fast enough. This is very good news. I didn’t start painting until the fourth day last year. The difference was having a sketch that I was completely in the grip of going in, and keeping it simple enough that it’s manageable.

So I’ll have no excuses for not finishing this one this year – not even the fact that I have to work Thursday morning and I’ll miss half the day.

Great to see everyone again and be back in the buzz. This really is so much fun. I so rarely get to study with people in person – nothing tops studying with Graydon personally, of course, and that’s my main orientation for the other 51 weeks of the year… but this is just flat-out fun, and I can’t wait for the post-midnight painting sessions with everyone going nuts and freaking out and helping each other get through it. I’m already looking forward to 2011.

Tomorrow will be James Gurney’s first IMC lecture, which should be a real treat. I hope he’ll become a regular member of the IMC faculty. I don’t think I’ve ever met a nicer guy, and he’s full of fascinating ideas and completely devoted to creativity. Good times.

Time for the Illustration Master Class again, right here in my home town of Amherst, MA. Check-in is tonight, and sketch reviews start in the morning.

While this weeklong class is much more oriented around the commercial / publishing world, and is more about getting assignments (book covers and so forth) cranked out quickly with whatever means are available (projecting, gridding, even tracing are all fair game to get the job done when a publisher is waiting with an immutable deadline) and less about the classical approaches to fine art, there’s still enough wiggle room for students who prefer to work that way, and the real value is in meeting all the people, watching other people work and asking questions, going to the various lectures, being up until 2am with 40 other people all frantically trying to work their pieces and help each other out, and just soaking in the raw energy of it all.

The first year, I wildly misunderstood what was meant by the sketch we were supposed to bring on the first day, and just had a few figure-drawing skeletons, scratchy things without even an idea. That didn’t go so well. Last year I was farther along and had reference and a concept, but still one that needed a lot of developing. This year I have an extremely concrete concept, something very specific, and I’m hoping I can push what I’ve got in my head without too many changes. There’s a backstory here that would take some telling, but the instant here is Joan of Arc hearing the voice of God for the second time – after having lost it previously and despairing for weeks, trying to hear it again – and being told to take up arms, drive the British out of France and save her country, which she will do and ultimately be burned at the stake for. I’m ready to defend it, but I’ll be open to what the instructors have to say as well, and hope they’re not too far apart. We’ll find out tomorrow.

Mother nature sneezed very hard on Western Mass the other night. Probably the first storm in 20 years that actually had me scared to go outside. Trees were popping all over the place… four down on the street outside within 75 yards of the house. One driver was pinned between two of them. Nobody hurt, but everyone got a good scare from 10 minutes of near-hurricane winds that came up out of nowhere after a quiet, hot day.

Frob has been slow lately, and the reality is that it will be until about the second week in July. I’m going to be very busy with things I’ll talk about later, and I’m busy now getting essential things done to clear the way for these things. As fun as they will be, I am also really looking forward to a slow second half of the summer.