Back to school -- seriously

 After Labour Day, it's back to school -- seriously.  My basic course work for fall semester will be drawing sessions at Basic Inquiry Studio in alternate weeks, supplemented by some special events here and there.

My plans for "summer school" were lost in the lazy days of summer, and after my most recent session in early August, the month morphed out of shape.  That August session was a bit out of shape itself, despite another terrific model.

I happened not to have the drawing tool I'd planned to use (a soft-grade Conté crayon), and that set me off on an insecure start with these 1-minute drawings:

 

I'd pre-planned some approaches to work on, and at least I managed a somewhat interesting planar analysis among the 5-minute poses:

By the time we were into ten minutes poses, I was having some discouraging problems with proportion.  (I think of this as The Day of the Incredible Shrinking Lower Legs).

 

Usually the last blast -- the three final half-hour poses -- makes the best of the session.  But I kept making false starts, eating up most of each half-hour, and finally decided just to play.  First play:-- the artists/students facing me on the other side of the model.  The two guys with the earphones listen to their own celestial music and draw like a dream; a real education to view their output.

 Next half-hour:  I drew the model (centre) and then using a tactic I've read about, I drew (on the left side of the sheet) what I imagined her to look like if I were positioned behind her.  Then, with just a few minutes left, I drew (right side of sheet) what I imagined her mirror image would look like.  Not easy!

For the finale, I made one last push to make a presentable piece of work.  And I can confidently say, from discreetly looking over others' shoulders (which everyone else does, too) that I was almost the only one to incorporate that nifty little stool the model is sitting on!

Next week:-- Summer vacation is over.  Back to Basics.  No more flitting around.

Loosen up? Smarten up!

It was *so* exciting to begin my eighth painting in the Flash Mob Series.  The title is "Loosen Up," and at the outset I felt I was really gliding along as I laid in the composition with the watercolour brush-pen shown above.  I could have gone on forever, drawing "wet" on my new Arches paper that immediately slurped the water away from the coloured guidelines.

Oddly, though, after working over old paintings for almost the whole past year, I'd forgotten some old hard-learned lessons.  The first of those -- remembered belatedly -- was, "Don't get too dark too fast."  It's easier to add progressively darker tones than it is to lighten up a dark patch.  The background was darker than I'd intended, and I realized there was no going back.

I'd forgotten another lesson, too, in those months of working on top of old paint.  The dynamics of working on unprimed white paper are entirely different, and the almost instant absorption can result in patchy expanses that need to be corrected later.  You'll see some here:

If you want to see the whole progression -- including the usual drama of heads, hands, feet  getting larger or smaller -- the whole sequence is here.

Things were pretty much corrected in the final painting -- the streakiness that shows is thanks to my wonderful camera picking up a kind of pentimento.

As it turned out, this is one of my favourites in the series -- because what I like best about the Flash Mobs, after the figures themselves, is the spaces between:--

I have #9 on the easel now and #10 in the planning stage.  After that, I can relax, loosen up, and dream about my next moves.  I have about eight possibilities floating around in my head right now.