Back to life drawing at the AFA

Tonight I returned to life drawing on Tuesday nights at the AFA Gallery in Scranton facilitated by Ted Michalowski. This evening we had the best model I seen in 8 months. An anatomy lesson on 2 feet. 

There were 10 of 15 people there. What amazes me is that most of them are drawing in small (9 x 12) sketchbooks with little sharp pencils. They can draw but they even put two or three poses on a page. I paper so expensive? Drawing is a physical thing. You have to move and gesture. And they mostly sit at a table or in a chair. I stand for for 3 hours and I'm an old guy. Most of them are young kids.  It takes me an hour and a half driving each way. then 2 or 2 hours of poses. It's a days work but worth it. They have better pizza in Scranton. We have better cow pies.

Here are a couple of tonights poses.

 

I'm developing a technique using a sharpie to set the key points and gray pastels to give the form mass... stay tuned

This model was fantastic... really fantastic.

A 3 minute pose... I like this a lot 

A work in progress

This is an experiment from the start. I thought I would try painting on Arches Oil paper. In the past I painted on bristle with oils with some success. I mounted a piece of this paper on a scrap piece of foam core. I thought this would be fairly simple. Was I wrong. It's like painting on a ShamWow sponge. Once there is a good base it's ok but I can't recommend this stuff unless you plan on priming it first. I may be good stuff if you paint with water soluble oils, which I do, and you want to paint with water as your medium sort of like water color. Maybe I'll try that. 

My reaction to the surface was to tighten up. I didn't loosen up til the very end. It took about 5-6 hours. Too long for a small. 10 x 9.

It's not quite done maybe tomorrow. 

 

Update: It's done. I did learn or relearn a bit. This is an extension of exploring brush stroke blurring. It looks a little abstract.

Life drawing tune-up

Every week I do at least 1 life drawing session. That's no easy task where I live in Northeastern PA.  I find it essential in my ability to see. I been doing this for about 6 months and it's made an enormous difference in both how I look at thing and how I'm painting. After a very long layoff from drawing and painting with my hands  I'm kinda loving this. Every week I experiment with different tools and techniques. 

It's quite different from painting plein air which I suck at. I am most definitely a studio painter. I feel too clumsy when outdoors painting. I do like to do quicky line art even if they nothing more than minute or two. The radiograph pen has something to do with that.

 

At Ianni's 9//3/13

First post - what - why - when...

Why am I doing this blog? It may be a convenient place to show the progress of works in progress. Also the occasional tutorial or how I do certain thing. Helpful links. A place for me to rank about whatever I might want to rant about.  

We just returned from a little vacation trip to Maine. Here I am Pemaquid  Point  in Maine. Maine is a paradise of of filtered light. This shot was taken on an I phone at magic light time.

Theres a lots of art and artists there. Many galleries featuring some really great painters, American realist painters, great commercial painters, and great plain air painters. Lots of cliched stuff but hey I'm kind of a cliche painter myself. 

I like boats as you might have decided looking at my galleries. I got a lot of excellent photos that I'll be developing into painting over the coming months.

Pemaquid Point, Maine   August 27, 2013