Saturday, February 06, 2010
2nd and 3rd Osborne Sessions
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!
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:
