So far we've had one class consisting of two 3-hour demos, and one painting class consisting of two 1.5-hour sketches and one 3-hour long pose. The former was brutally long, despite how valuable it was to be able to watch a master at work. The latter seemed to fly by, and I have nothing to show for it except for three somewhat crappy slops of color somewhat resembling a cowboy playing a banjo.
In any case, I've decided to start posting some of the artwork from these Saturday classes, as well as the charcoal sketches that I'm doing in the Tuesday night long pose. Hopefully I'll see some improvement over time; in particular, I am looking to hone in my understanding of color, which is woefully primitive and currently relies solely on heuristics.
1.5 hr sketch
1.5 hr sketch
3 hr sketch
Yeah, they're not very good. I've used oils before, but I've always had a lot of trouble with it. I found myself struggling a lot with knowing what colors I was seeing, as well as which colors to mix to achieve those colors. Over time I got a little bit better at understanding "okay the temperature here is slightly warmer, so I want to add a little bit more yellow/red," but I still couldn't quite hit the colors on the first try like a lot of the other people in the class could.
Not to mention, I have zero brush technique, so I found that I was mixing colors when I didn't want to, and my paint always had either too much or too little medium, making it either too dry or too drippy. *shrug* That's why we take the class, to learn!
3 hr sketch
Since I'm taking the painting class, I figured I should also practice my other basic skills w.r.t shape and value, so I decided to go to the long pose class tonight. This took wayyy longer than I thought it would (I thought I'd drop in for an hour or two), but overall I'm pretty happy with it (even though I didn't finish the hands). I think I got the likeness of the dude pretty well.
I also noticed there were some things that were coming back to me as I was drawing. In particular, I was remembering about how there is bounce light off the back side to make the darker core, which I tried to catch on the arm. Also, I haven't touched charcoal in a long time, and I just love the way it smears, and then you can just take it away with the eraser - it's really like painting in value only without the hue.
Something that I started doing when I went in later with the eraser was trying to add and subtract according to the actual planes of the surface. I normally have a lot of trouble with this, but I found that the further into the zone I got, the easier it was to think in those terms. I really like that style, and I'd like to practice it more. Next time I think I'll try drawing in the planes without first drawing in the linework.
