Leroy's Art Blog

So how was that?  You know when to stop painting when it will hurt the painting if you do anything more?  Well sometimes that means you will go too far and then have to erase, or somehow recover.  That is where I am with Corina:  I thought a lighter "sky" and a layer of mountain-y stuff would be the cat's meow.  WRONG.  It makes it look like THIS:



Fortunately it won't be very hard to recover from this, simply by repainting the top of the canvas.  That darker blue might show through anyway, but if anything I think a ghost of it might add to the overall quality.  We shall see.

Corina is continuing to hold her pose for two more classes.  I could do another painting of her, but I really am not thrilled to paint yet another nude, and I do want to try some other subjects using Osborne's style.  Thought about the construction site across the street, with its heavy equipment, steel framework and flapping sheets.  But too complex and no obvious central point.

So I decided to paint one of the other students.  Did a quick pencil sketch to see how it might lay out, then got to work.  I'm glad we will have another session, and hope my model is still painting Corina from the same position.  As of now, here's where things stand on this one:








Otherwise, the Frances Harper portrait is still coming along.  I finally bit the bullet and am now in the middle of re-painting her right hand.  Actually, the amputation and re-implantation is going a little more smoothly than I anticipated.  I showed the portrait to the Master, Ted Xaras, and he had some additional suggestions that I will incorporate.  And I showed it to Rev. Nate, who was quite happy with it based on Frances' "serene but forceful" bearing.

Today I must pick up the two painting that have been on display at The Plastic Club Small Worlds exhibition,  and deliver two others to the Sketch Club Art of the Flower exhibition.

Meanwhile Howard, down at the front desk, seemed really interested in having me paint a portrait of his parents.  But I haven't been able to move that along, so it may just have been happy talk.  Oh well.

Today I worked on the figure - modified the head, added shadow on the neck, and generally cut 'way back on the greenish tint of the body (although that probably doesn't show in these images). 

There is this whole problem area:  when do you decide that a painting is finished?  The answer is that you stop when doing anything more will make the painting worse instead of better.  Well, I got to that point today and kept going.  Had to wipe out some of the stuff I did to get the body of the model back to a good point.  Osborne emphatically agreed that I had reached the stopping point.  So the lady now looks like this:


Of course there is quite a bit of stuff to do.  Edges to clean up like that strange bump on her hip, etc.  The blue at the top should go lighter, with maybe an intermediate blue layer as well.  And I've got to check out her glowing right thigh - I hadn't noticed that on the painting, and hope it is an artifact of the photo.  But in any case, I don't need the model to do those final corrections and will handle them on my own time.

We still have the model for two more weeks, so I should be able to move to a new position, and try for a second (smaller) painting of her from a different angle.  We'll see.

Well, my intent was/is to post to the blog every week, after each class with Osborne.  But our double snowstorms this week wiped out the class.  Philadelphia has been shut down - quiet, barely any traffic, all schools and lots of businesses closed.   So, a reprieve until next week.

I know my postings have become rather sketchy, with about a month between posts lately.  That's NOT good.  Sorry about that.  But now I'm in an exciting class with Elizabeth Osborne, so this is my fourth posting TODAY.  I want the Blog to be a step-by-step diary of the course, for better or worse.  So, to catch up on where things are as of right now, go back three postings and begin following the process from there.  Won't say anything more about that here - if you go back and start three posts ago, you'll see what my intentions are well enough.

Meanwhile, I've been progressing slowly on the portrait of Frances Harper, so should have something to say about that before too long.  And I've been working on something to get ready for the Sketch Club exhibition, "Flowers."  Not a preferred subject of mine, but maybe with an angle....

This session began by comparing the large sketch I'd made with the actual model and correcting the proportions, and discussing the composition with Osborne.  When that seemed more or less OK, I transferred the image to the canvas.  Then, with trepidation, I tentatively began to lay in some paint in the light areas.

Osborne came by, and tactfully asked "Is that the usual way you begin painting the figure?"  "No," I admitted.  I'd been intimidated by the subject and the class, treating the whole thing as far too Precious.  So I took a deep breath and painted the middle tones over the whole area and got much looser in my approach.  That helped.  I also laid in a little background color to see how it might work, before the session ended.  Overall, this did NOT produce a result that I am at all happy with.  As a matter of fact, if I can't do better than this I should just drop the whole thing - really, at the end of this session I was feeling rather depressed.  But it was a start, at least.  The only thing I do like about it at this point is the effect of that violent orange - a color I never would have considered before this class:


 After leaving the class, I again did a seried of small studies to look at various ways to proceed: 


The bright colors of the top right study seem best, although the shapes above the figure are not good, and I should go farther in decreasing the saturation of the colors above her (and, Osborne suggested, let them get cooler than the colors below the figure).

 With all this in mind, things did get somewhat better in the 3rd Session:

 There is still a long way to go, but at least I feel that I have the structure of something interesting.  Proportions generally OK.  Lots of tweaking of colors and relationships needed, and decisions about the level of detail to impose on the figure but as a start, I feel a lot better about it now.  Whew!

 A lot of the first session went into getting materials for various poses and setups of the model, adjusting lights, considering sightlines from various locations, etc.  Finally the class decided on a horizontal pose with the model (Corina) lying on a table with a couple of solid-color blankets beneath her.

That left time enough to make a couple of small sketches of the model to think about until the next session:


My first thought was that I loved the full-length figure - her extended foot and her hand positions seemed to be very interesting parts of the pose.  However, using the whole figure also elongates the figure a great deal, and almost seem a distraction from the figure.  So, at home, I copied the sketch I’d made, and tried making a bunch of small studies with pen and ink, in order to (1) see if it would be better to crop the figure, and how strongly, and (2) to explore what dimensions would be best for the composition.  Osborne had suggested that we use a relatively large canvas - and indeed, the kind of simple compositions typical of Osborne really do require a large space.

Some studies of the figure, with various length/width dimensions and various degrees of cropping:


Actually, I think the diamond shape is very attractive, but maybe a bit hokey.  The full-length figure (top & middle, right) don't look so great any more - the interesting details are at the edges of the composition and it kind of leaves a hole in the middle.  Cropping, but including the hands and face still seem to draw too much attention there (top left, bottom right), so the best option is the torso itself (bottom left).  These little studies also suggest that the best height/width dimensions for the canvas would be 4x5.

But Utrecht Art Supply didn't have a large 4x5 canvas, so I ended up with a 30" x40" (3x4) canvas.  Not exactly what I wanted, but OK.  The next step was to blow up my study sketch to canvas size to see how it might look:


Now looking forward to our next session with Osborne, and Corina.