Life Drawing, Short Poses

I run a life drawing session in my studio once a week.  It's geared towards painters and others who want a long pose.  I hadn't been to a session with short(er) poses in a long time, but the other night, the Blue Spiral gallery hosted one.  As it turns out, I had a great time.  It was fun to just use a pencil and paper, work fast, and let it flow.  When things are really flowing, it's wonderful.  And my drawings were working.  So here are a few of the images.  Click on them for larger versions.

 These were quick, 1-minute sketches.

 This was longer, maybe 2 minutes.

 Another 2-minute sketch.

 A 5-minute one. 

 Turns out, the other artists made great models, too!

Portrait study of one of the models ...

And a portrait study of the other.

So now I'm thinking of running maybe one session a month in my studio of just short poses.  Could be fun!

Painting from Photographs

For many painters, working from photos is a touchy subject.  There are many purists who totally reject the idea of using photos at all.  For them, working directly from life is the only way to paint and using photos is cheating.  At the other extreme are those who copy photos directly.  Those artists are either photorealists, whose work is painstakingly detailed, or they're inexperienced artists who just copy what's in front of them.  The inexperienced artists have good intentions but don't have the knowledge of what works and what doesn't in a painting.

I'm in the middle.  I use photos as reference tools and find them useful, but they can't provide everything I need to make a good artwork.  I love working from life, but there are things that working from life just can't provide, either.

So let's look at what a photo is.  A photograph is a moment in time, as seen through a single lens and recorded on film or pixels.  It's a mechanical image.  A person can adjust what the camera sees and how it sees it.  The camera then records what comes through the lens.  The camera has no thought, no selectivity, no judgement.  To it, a pixel is a pixel is a pixel.  A good photographer, however, can make those pixels speak volumes.  I have a nephew who can do amazing things with cameras, and his photos are true works of art.

Most photos aren't.  Most are snapshots or other visual notes.  I use my cameras to take a lot of visual notes for future use.  Clouds, fields, tree lines, horses, people floating down the river on inner tubes, rock walls, old wooden floors - these are things that nobody would ever want to frame and hang on their wall, or even put into a Facebook photo album.  But I have found in creating paintings that sometimes I need to know what a particular type of cloud might look like at a particular time of day.  Or I need to know what a rock wall might look like.  Stopping the painting and running around trying to find the right rock wall is not an option.  So I'm always watching for things that might be useful in a painting someday.  When I find something, I snap a photo, or maybe a bunch of them, and then those photos go into a reference file.

By now, you've probably noticed that the vast majority of my artworks are about people.  For years, I thought the only way to draw and paint people was to work from life.  To some extent, that's still true.  Most of my artworks are not just about people, they're about specific people.  I generally don't use figures to tell my own story, I see other people and want to capture something of their story.  I like to get something of an individual's personality and character on paper or canvas.  To do that, I have to work directly with the individual.  It's by sitting with them, talking, and seeing how they carry themselves, how they speak, how they listen, and even just how they sit, that I can pick up something of who they are.  And that's what I try to carry into an artwork.

But working from life has some drawbacks.  For one, drawing and painting can take a long time.  I can usually work on a drawing or painting a heck of a lot longer than the subject can sit still.  And I have to respect that their time is just as valuable as mine.  So the time factor has to be considered.

Another consideration is that when you're working from life, the subject is always moving.  Sometimes a lot, sometimes just a little, but nobody can sit perfectly still.  And when a model takes a break, they never get back in exactly the same position.  It's always a little different, and fabric never ever ever comes close to the same position.  So when you work from life, you're creating an image of the subject's average position.

I've found that working from photographs and working from life are complementary.  Each has strengths and weaknesses.  When working from life, I get a sense of the person.  I can create an image that may have feeling but is often technically flawed.  When working from photos, there's an emotional distance that makes it easier to see things as two-dimensional shapes, values, and colors.  I can be a bit more clinically analytical about shapes and values in a photo than I can when faced with the real person.  This also gives me a bit of freedom to change things around, add things, or eliminate things, if it will make a better painting.  Sometimes there's the "tyranny of what's there" in real life that just doesn't work in paint.

For the past couple of years, I've been working with models to create this long series of charcoal and pastel figurative artworks.  One approach that has proven useful is to have the subjects come to the studio where we'll shoot a ton of photos.  When I say "ton", I mean 400-1,000 in an hour.  Later, I'll identify specific photos that have strong potential as an artwork.  And then I'll work from the photo.  The difference between this approach and working from somebody else's snapshot is that now I know the person, I controlled the lighting, and with all the other photos just before and after the one selected, I have a lot of reference material to work with.  I can select what to include and exclude.  The whole time, I've still got my impression of the subject in my head, so it's not just a photo that I'm working with, but also my impression of Amy, Emma, Troy, James, or whoever.  And that almost always comes through.  I don't know how, it just does.

And in photos, I'll see things that I might've missed in real life.  Things like the specific way the shadow falls across the neck, or a reflected light hits a jawline.  The next time I work with a model (any model), I will look for those things.  So the impression of a person that I get when working from life carries over into the times when I work from photos.  And the details I notice when working from photos feeds back into what I look at when I'm working from life.

So, yes, working from life and working from photos are complementary approaches.  I use them both.

Working from Life

I run a life drawing session in my studio every week.  This is a chance to get with a bunch of other artists, share a model's expenses, and try to learn something new about working from life.  It's a lot of fun.  It's also a challenge.  I try to push myself every week so that I'm not in a rut.  I'll work in oil for a couple of weeks, then switch to charcoal and pastel.  Sometimes I'll focus on a portrait, other times I'll see if I can get the whole figure in.  I don't post all that many of the works anywhere since about half of them wind up being destroyed or painted over.  But sometimes, things click pretty well and I'm happy with what's finally on the paper or canvas.

Last week, we had a lovely young lady working with us.  She is into yoga big-time and has very well-defined muscles.  No, she's not a bodybuilder by any means - just somebody who's muscle and bone structure are very much in harmony.  We started the session with our usual 1-minute poses.  We do this to warm up both the model and the artists and to find a pose that works for both.  One of the poses highlighted the curve and muscles of her back in a striking way.  So that was the pose I chose for the rest of the evening, and here's how it came out:

If this looks like it was an uncomfortable pose to hold, it was.  The poor girl's knees and legs took a beating and we had to take several extra breaks so she could get her circulation back!

I started this with soft vine charcoal on Canson Mi-Teintes light yellow paper.  The charcoal is easily manipulated and lets me block things in, smudge things to get an area of gray, and even erase it easily.  My focus was on her shoulders, upper back, and along the spine.  Once I had a good drawing in place, I hit some areas with compressed charcoal.  This stuff is very black and doesn't lift, so when you put it down, it stays.  The last stage was the pastel.  I kept the colors soft and subtle.  There were lots of interesting colors all over due to the lighting.  My overhead lights are daylight-balanced, so they're a bit blue, while the spotlight is a tungsten bulb and so it's a warm yellow.  Normally, our eyes automatically adjust for color and we usually don't see the effects of different colored lighting, but in the studio, it's very noticeable.  With this figure, the warm light was mostly on her shoulders and upper back, while her hips and legs were picking up a lot of the blue lighting.

So I think it turned out pretty well, particularly for a drawing from life.  I love it when that happens!

The Embody Project

Last week, I had the opportunity to work with Erica Mueller and Trey Scott.  They're partners in the Embody Project, a photo and video exploration of people and body issues.  I won't tell you any more than that, except to say: go look at the project's web site, and spend a lot of time there.  It's good stuff.  Erica is a professional photographer and Trey a professional videographer.  They bring their highly-developed skills to this very heart-felt project.  I was highly impressed just looking at their web site, so the opportunity to work with two pros was too good to pass up.

Erica wanted to do a photo session with an artist's life model.  She needed a working artist's studio and some artists to draw the figure.  My studio was certainly available and so were a couple of other artists.  We gathered there last Thursday.  The model, David, is a really nice guy who turned out to be an outstanding figure model - very experienced, very good poses, and lots of material to work with.  When we set up the studio, our mission was to allow Erica and Trey to get the best shots they could of artists working from the figure.  Our own drawing experience was in the "nice to do" category but it was not the purpose of the session.  One of the things Erica noticed during setup was that the spotlight on the model was very warm, while the supporting lights for the artists were very cool, almost blue.  As you'll see in her resulting photo, this actually turned out for the best, as it provided a conceptual break between David and the artists.

When we actually got moving, it was intense.  We did ten 1-minute poses.  I was working with vine charcoal on paper, Tebbe was using pencil, and Mark was doing oil on panel.  David, the model, kept time in his head, and moved from one pose to the next quickly and seamlessly.  Ever done 1-minute life drawing?  You gotta move fast.  Get it down, get it right, keep moving, because it's gonna be over in a few seconds and you start a new one.  I compared it to being on a ski slope when you're in over your head but committed, and your only option is to ride that slope and stay on your feet.  Here are a couple of my sketches:

After a short break to discuss the next steps, we did a couple of 10-minute poses.  After those short poses, ten minutes seemed like forever ... at least until the time was up, in which case it was way too short.  Again, it was intense.  Draw quick: time's almost up!

Through it all, Erica and Trey kept shooting.  Erica must have taken a thousand photos.  Trey had his camera going constantly, sometimes on the tripod and sometimes walking around.  I'd be working away and out of the corner of my eye would see a figure and camera moving slowly around us, peering over our shoulders or backing out to take in the whole scene.

And then it was done.  We stood around discussing the experience and started packing up.  It took a while.  Anytime you have a shared, intense experience, it takes some time to come down from it.

From the thousand or so photos that Erica took, she has posted one, along with David's own thoughts.  It's really good.  You can see it here: embodyproject.com/david-usa/.

Different Figure Drawing Styles

Since my last post, I've been to a number of life drawing sessions and, in between, have been painting the fall colors.  These are two very different subjects that can't be tackled in the same post.  So I'll talk about figure drawings today and talk about fall landscapes next time.

The Asheville area is fortunate to have a lot of life drawing sessions going on every week.  On Monday evenings, David Lawter has a two-hour session that is entirely short poses.  He starts with 1-minutes and ends with a 5-minute.  That's quick.  Because of that, it's lots of fun: you have to have to keep moving because the next pose isn't going to wait.  My drawings usually have a lot of life to them because of that.  On Wednesday evenings, Frank Lombardo runs a 3-hour, single-pose session in Marshall.  This is the polar opposite of David's session and is great for painting.  On Thursday evenings, David has a two-hour session that is mostly 20-minute poses - great for drawings that have some development to them.  Yes, that means David runs two sessions a week.  The guy is dedicated.  If you're interested in either Frank's or David's sessions, contact me and I'll put you in touch with them.

I'm constantly trying to improve my skills, so going back and forth between the different sessions is good.  It doesn't let me get into a rut.  I'm also constantly looking at other artists and seeing what I can learn from them.  One I'm looking at pretty hard now is Steve Huston.  Steve lives/works out west and is associated with the New Masters Academy in Huntington Beach, in the Los Angeles area.   I took an online workshop with him early this year (here's the post).  He's done a number of videos about his technique, some of which are on YouTube and others on the New Masters website.  I watched a video and decided to try out some of the ideas at the 3-hour life drawing session.  Here's what resulted:

This didn't come out at all like I intended and looks nothing like a Huston drawing.  However, it was an interesting exercise.  I did a rough line block-in of the figure in vine charcoal on a pale toned paper, then smudged charcoal all over the place,  Then, in addition to laying in the darks with more charcoal, I drew just as much with the kneaded eraser to pull out the lights.  The result has a lot of heft and volume.  It's more like a traditional style of drawing, I think - slow and deliberate.  Yes, it's probably overworked, and some parts need more development (which they've gotten since this photo was taken).  Still, I got to try some new ways of working, and added some new tools to my drawing tool chest.

After this, I went back to Huston's work to figure out where we were different.  I saw that Huston is very concerned with the form, and builds it up with fluid, flowing, gestural lines (like what I do with the very short poses).  He then focuses on three lines: the two outside edges of the figure, and the intermediate shadow in between.  The "intermediate shadow" is the one at the boundary between the lighted and shadowed area.  Getting this one right is really critical to getting the feel for volume in the figure.  You have to pay close attention to where it is wide and narrow, where it has soft edges and sharp, and how light or dark it is.  Huston also works with a small range of light values and a small range of darks, not a full spectrum of values like I did in the drawing above.

So I went to a session with shorter, 20-minute poses, and here's one of the results:

This one started with more gestural strokes and then was gradually developed using both the vine charcoal and kneaded eraser.  I tried to keep both tools working quickly and not get bogged down in detail.  I also tried to limit the values to a small range of lights and a small range of darks.  Most importantly, I paid close attention to the outside lines of the form as well as the intermediate shadows.  You'll see that some of the outside lines are pretty heavy.  A heavy, dark line accentuates the light volume of the form next to it.  Mostly, though, it's the intermediate shadows that define the volumes of the form.  Follow the intermediate shadows down from the shoulders, through the hips, and down the legs, and you'll see how their movement back and forth shows how she's standing and twisting.

Finally, here's a detail from a sheet of figure drawings from Monday's short-pose session.  I used the same principles here as in the drawing above.  Quick gestural lines establish the figure, while hatched areas indicate the shadowed areas and create the figure's volume.  This was done with a mechanical pencil on a Strathmore sketchbook.

This is actually a pretty similar approach to the one I talked about in a post last month, in which I used a Sharpie pen during the 20-minute poses.  As a refresher, here's one of those drawings:

This is quick and gestural, but it doesn't have the same focus on the intermediate shadow.  It's still a pretty decent drawing.  Different tools and different approaches are needed for different drawings.  I feel like I've expanded my capabilities a bit over the past month or so.  Cool stuff.

By the way (crass commercialism alert), several of these drawings are available on my Etsy gallery at ridiculously reasonable prices.  Just sayin'.

Artwork Updates

A few weeks ago, a cousin sent me a box of old family photographs.  Her father passed away several months ago and she's been sorting through all his effects.  These photos were of my mother, her parents, and her maternal grandparents.

One of the photos grabbed my attention.  It was taken a few months after I was born, when my parents visited my mom's family to show off their new addition.  They handed me to my great-grandfather, Ruben Bell, and snapped this picture:

I was really taken with Ruben's expression.  This was a man who led a hard-scrabble life.  He had been a sharecropper in rural Tennessee and had buried four of his six children early.  Now here he was, in his 70's, with his first great-grandchild.  This was the only time we were together, though.  Ruben died on Christmas Eve a few months after this picture was taken.

Being and artist, I had to do something with this image.  So I grabbed a canvas and here's the result:

Ruben and Me

Oil on canvas, 24"x18", 2014

I liked the fact his face was in heavy shadow, yet you could still get a strong impression of his emotions.  The background had to change a bit.  My posture in the photo was inelegant, to say the least, so it had to be modified, and while I was at it, I changed the outfit and added a blanket.  This may look like a simple copy of a photo, but trust me, it isn't - and it was harder than it looked.  Sometimes things come together quickly and other times they don't.  I wouldn't call this one a "fight", but there were some aspects that required, shall we say, a considerable amount of heated discussion between me and the damn paint.  But it works and I'm happy with it.

There are quite a few other photos in that box that are crying out for similar treatment.  I might do a series of paintings based on them.  Sounds like a bit of fun!

In addition to this painting, I've been going to life drawing sessions when I can.  Here's one from last night:

The Monday night sessions that I go to are two hours of very short poses, lasting only one to three minutes each.  That's quite a challenge in itself, as you have to get the essence of the pose very quickly.  If you don't get it, tough luck - we're already on the next pose.  It's actually a lot of fun.  Last night, our model was an aerial gymnast.  She spent several years doing aerial acrobatics with the circus.  She was the one who had the long streams of colored silk that she'd wrap around herself and do all kinds of flips and rolls 30 feet in the air.  Last night, though, she was only a few feet in the air but still doing some amazing things.  Like the splits in this quick sketch here.  Every try to draw somebody that's hanging upside down?  It's quite difficult.  Since everything is turned  around and coming at you from unusual angles, you have to actually look at what's there, understand it, and put it down on paper.  If you're used to drawing figures, you often draw automatically, because you're used to the eyes being this far above the nose, which is this far above the mouth, with a chin that's formed in a certain way.  When everything is reversed, your brain goes "erf?" and short-circuits, and you have to connect your eyes to your drawing hand.  Which should be connected anyway.  So this was a great exercise.  Go find yourself an aerial gymnast and draw her/him - you'll learn a lot!

Other life drawing sessions are more traditional.  I went to one that had traditional 20-min poses.  This allowed me to work with charcoal and Conte crayon again.  I hadn't used those in quite some time, so I was a bit rusty, but it came together again after a bit.  Here's one of sketches I did:

B's Back

Charcoal and Conte crayon on toned paper, 13"x10"

I've got this one in my Etsy shop now, along with quite a few others.

So that's a sampling of what I've been working on lately.  Hope to have more to show you soon.

Life Drawing, Short Poses

I go to several different life drawing sessions around Asheville.  There's one, on Monday evenings, that is unique in that it consists entirely of short poses.  By "short", I mean one to two minutes, with maybe three 5-minute poses at the end.  If you've ever done life drawing, you know that's not much time.  You have to work fast and get it right the first time.  If you don't, well, just wait a minute and start a whole new one, because there's no going back.

Here are a few drawings from Monday's session.  We had one of my favorite models, Amy, who is a beautiful young lady and really good at twisting herself into great poses.  This was a very fun session.

I've put these four drawings up on my Etsy store - have a look!.

Life Drawing Again

Last night, I went to a life drawing session at David Lawter's studio in Asheville.  David's Monday night sessions are unique in this area.  All the poses in this 2-hour session are short.  Really short.  We start with 1-minute poses then go to 2 minutes, and end with 5 minutes.  Most other sessions around here start with a 5-minute pose as a "quick" warm-up.

I find these short poses to be a heckuva lot of fun.  They're a challenge: you have to get it right, right away, because there is no going back.  Before you're ready, the buzzer has buzzed and the model is on to a new pose.  Deal with it!

Our model was Amy.  This young lady is a real live-wire.  She looks like Marissa Tomei and is bubbly, energetic, creative, and so much fun to work with.  These short poses really suit her.  She squirms around until she's contorted into some really difficult position, and then holds it like a rock.  The short poses let her get into incredible positions that are really impossible for anything longer than five minutes.  So the combination of short poses and Amy's creativity meant that we had two hours of some really challenging drawing.

So here are a few pages from my sketchbook:

Can't wait for next week!

Studio Work

We had a life drawing session in the studio this past week.  This was the first evening session I've run in over two years.  And as it's still summer, I had a typical summer result: only one other artist showed up.  This didn't really matter to me, though, since I schedule these sessions for my own practice, and open them up to others because it's fun.

Claire was our model.  She's been working with my groups for maybe ten years now.  Claire is an artist, a performance artist, and a dancer, and she has a good feel for what makes an interesting pose.  This one, for example, brought out the muscles around her neck and collar bones.

Actually, it was a tough pose to hold.  To get the strain, she carried her weight on her arms and tilted her head back.  So she'd hold it for as long as she could (five to ten minutes), then relax for a few minutes, and go again.  She was a trooper.  We gave her an easy pose after this so she could recuperate.

Meanwhile, I'm about to wrap up the latest "model in the studio" painting.  Only need to do some work on one small area and then it'll be signed, photographed, posted here, and put up on the rack.  I've got some ideas for the next one.  We're going to have another life drawing session this Wednesday with a different model, and she might give me some more ideas.

I'm going to be part of a show at the Asheville Area Arts Council next month.  It's "Thought-Provoking Art by Six UNCA Alumni", curated by Robert Tynes.  Since almost all of my "thought-provoking" work has already been exhibited here in Asheville, I want to make something new.  I've tentatively decided on an Afghanistan-based image.  But I needed a canvas and didn't have one of the right size available.  So I stripped an old painting off its stretcher bars yesterday.  It was one of those paintings that was a little too good to throw away, but not good enough to be pulled out and shown anywhere, so it's been sitting on my storage rack for ten years.  (If you're an artist, you know that kind of artwork: you've probably got several of them on your storage rack, just like I do!)  Then I reworked the frame a bit because my standards for stretchers have gotten a lot more stringent since it was first made.  Now it has a tight canvas with three coats of gesso, and another will be laid on tomorrow.  Then I'll lay a tone on it and let it dry for a week or so while I'm off in Indiana.  When I come back, I'll have two weeks to get it done.  That's not a lot of time for me - some of mine can take months.  Deadlines are deadlines, though ...

  

Life Drawing Again!

Last night, I went to my first life drawing session in two years.  Two years!  Yes, I was rusty, but that was to be expected.  We had a lovely model who provided some unexpected drama when she fainted dead away in her first long pose.  Fortunately, she was sitting on the platform when she passed out, so she didn't have far to go, but it was a little frightening for her and for us.  She rallied back and was perfectly okay the rest of the session.  So here are a couple of the sketches:

This one was done with a pen.  Drawing a soft female figure with a harsh black pen is a challenge, which is why I did it - the whole point being to loosen myself up.

This later one was done with a really crappy plastic mechanical pencil.  I like a good mechanical pencil, but this must've come from K-Mart or something.  But you run what ya brung, so there 'tis.

Life Drawing

Claire

Charcoal and Conte crayon on toned paper

Last night we had our regular Wednesday night life drawing session. Our model, Claire, is a dancer and always takes wonderfully graceful poses. My first couple of drawings were junk, but then things started clicking and this was the last one of the evening. I think it came out pretty well.

Because of the preparations for the show at Mars Hill College and with job-hunting, I haven't been able to put a drop of paint on the portrait in over a week. I'm going through withdrawals now! Must .... paint .... must .... paint .....

Over the last couple of weeks, I've developed a bad case of tennis elbow in my right arm. Okay, so it actually started a year ago from working out in the gym in Iraq. I was able to pretty much ignore it for a long time ... "it'll go away ..." - NOT! And now it has gotten to the point where my arm locks up when I'm working at the easel and constantly burns. So I've got an appointment this afternoon to have it looked at. I can hear Dr. Heiselmann now: "So, how long has this been going on?" Me: "Umm ... a year ..." Okay, so I'm a bit hard-headed and slow!

Life Drawing Session

This is a small, 16"x12" oil sketch done last night during our life drawing session. I decided to challenge myself and use oil paint instead of charcoal and paper. This, and the other three, were done in 20 minutes or so. I wiped out all the others, but this one was interesting. The model's pose had a lot of power to it, which is what I tried to capture.

Today, I'm working on a large (60"x40") portrait of a young woman. It is, frankly, "commission bait", an example of what I can do. Today I worked up the drawing and transferred it to the toned canvas. Tomorrow, the paint starts flowing.

Life Drawing in the Studio

My life drawing sessions continue to go pretty well. Last night we had a new model. My drawing was pretty crappy at first, but then it started coming together.

Cari #1

Cari #2

Today I'm working on the painting of the model in the red dress again. It's been over a week since I last painted and, as usual, getting back into the swing of things takes some time. But it's getting there.

Studio Developments

My prints and drawings are now up at Bella Vista Art Gallery in Biltmore Village in Asheville. The show will run through the end of December. So far, all the comments I've been hearing are really good, so I'm pretty stoked. It feels really good to have a quality show up on a gallery wall. I'll get some pictures and post them here soon.

I hung another show a couple of days ago. The artists of the Cotton Mill have a group show at the Clingman Cafe, right here in the River Arts District. I think it looks pretty good as a whole. My contribution was two older paintings (Portrait of Our Shoes and Strange Fruit) plus a giclee print (Generation).

All 150 artists in the River Arts District are getting ready for the Studio Stroll, which comes up in a week. We're hoping the weather will be good and bring out thousands of visitors. The Stroll is a great time to see lots of different artists in their studios, many of whom don't open their studios otherwise. I haven't yet decided what I'll have up on the walls this time - maybe my newest work-in-progress?

Which is a sitting, full-figure portrait of a lovely young lady. I started it in our life drawing session last night. This is one of those paintings where everything seemed to click right from the very beginning. The drawing was pretty accurate, the colors worked, and the whole thing was fun. Two hours isn't enough to get a canvas like this done, so she's coming back for another session tonight. Any artist who wants to come draw or paint from life is welcome to show up. Here's how the painting looks right now:

The mural on the side of the Cotton Mill is now done. Here's how it looks:

It's getting a lot of attention. We have cars pulling in to the parking lot every day just to take pictures of it, and it was featured in the Asheville paper. I think it's pretty cool. Those windows on the top floor above the mural, by the way, are to my studio.

So now it's time to get going. The dogs finally woke up and I have to get them walked and to the groomers.

Studio Stuff

Last night was our weekly life drawing session. We normally start with a series of 30-second poses. These are gesture drawings, very quick, and they help both the model and the artist loosen up. Here's one page from my drawing pad, with four poses on it.

Then we went into 20-minute poses. Here are two of mine. I was using conte crayons, both white and black, on gray Mi-Teintes paper. The gray paper gives an overall medium tone, the black crayon provides the basic drawing, and the few white highlights give it extra depth and life. I've found that it's best to be a bit stingy with the white.

The past couple of days have been occupied with non-studio work. I had to put together the monthly newsletter and get it out. It didn't help when the system ate my draft three times and kept trying to send the previous month's newsletter. Then, once it went out, I had to publish it on FaceBook and LinkedIn. All of which took time. All these contemporary, time-saving methods of generating publicity take a good bit of time to do right. It just kills me to see these ads on TV showing people "effortlessly" doing a zillion things at once on their smart phone while they sip cappuccino on a beach. Yeah, buddy: anyone who has ever fought with an "effortless" interface that is anything but effortless will just laugh at those commercials!

I got to spend a good bit of time working on the conception of a new narrative painting, though. In an earlier post, I wrote about how I didn't have that creative thinking process going yet. It's still not up to speed, but yesterday afternoon, it got a good workout. I had three ideas for paintings, worked through what they might mean to me and to others, settled on one idea that had the most promise, and then worked at developing the concept. There was a lot of drawing, cutting and taping (literally, not Photoshop cut-and-paste), sitting down with my journal and thinking, then going back and removing or adding things.

I mentioned a journal. This is an indispensable part of my creative thinking, a way to get my thoughts out on paper. I use a sort of guided stream-of-consciousness writing: I'll focus on the artwork (the conceptual drawings, actual painting, whatever it is I'm working on) and scribble down my gut thoughts and impressions. There's no thinking or editing, my pen is just recording whatever's bouncing around in my brain. Sometimes it can be quite surprising - I'll write something and then wonder where in the hell that thought came from. Well, it came from the subconscious. One of the things I grew to learn in the art program is that the subconscious is very active all the time. "Gut feelings" are really decisions that your subconscious has already reached but your conscious brain hasn't figured out yet. So I learned to work with it. When considering an idea for a new painting, I'll look at a lot of stuff related to it: lots of different images, writings, whatever I can find. Then I let it percolate for a while in my subconscious, sometimes prodding it a bit ("hey, brain, what's up with that idea? Got anything we can work with yet?"). Before I went to Iraq, this process was working fairly well. Sometimes it would come up with things I hadn't even asked yet - my painting Pleasantville is one example that just came to me overnight. But since I've been back, it is really rusty, and going through the creative process with this new painting-to-be is slow. But it'll come together. It's like any other skill: if you don't use it for a while, it atrophies. The good news is that once you start exercising it, it comes back. So that's what I'm working on today.

And now it's time to get back to work.

New Work

Checkpoint

Oil on panel, 16"x12"

Here's the newest in my series of portraits from Iraq. The Sons of Iraq were the paramilitary part of the Sunni Awakening, which was the group that turned against Al Qaeda and brought peace to the central part of the country. The Sons of Iraq established checkpoints pretty much everywhere. However, they often had to hide their faces to avoid being recognized and killed by Al Qaeda and Shi'ite militias.

Figure Study #3

Conte on paper, 24"x18"

Figure Study #4

Conte on paper, 24"x18"

The life drawing sessions in my studio continued last night. We had a good turnout - seven people - and a lovely model to work with. Although the conte crayon gave me fits at the beginning, I adjusted to it. My hand-eye coordination is getting better now that it's had a bit of practice.

Life Drawing in the Studio

Whitney #1 (detail)

Charcoal on paper, 24"x18"

Whitney #2

Charcoal on paper, 18"x24"

We had our second life drawing session of the season in my studio last night. A good crowd turned out to work with our lovely model, Whitney. I'm a lot happier with my work this week. The coordination is coming back between my eyes and hands. Can't wait for next week!

In my post yesterday, I mentioned something about how the maples hadn't started changing yet. What a difference 24 hours makes! Coming in to the studio this morning, the trees all along the highway had suddenly started changing to yellows and oranges. I swear, yesterday they were green, today they're not. We haven't hit the peak by any means, but it is startling how fast the change occurred. Looks like we're going to have a beautiful leaf season. This will be my first in three years - I missed fall entirely in '08 and '09 while working in Iraq. I'm going to enjoy it now that I can!

Speaking of Iraq, this morning I saw the newsletter from the Gulf Region District, which is the Corps of Engineers command that I worked for in Iraq. There was an article on page 14 that stopped me dead: it was about four capacity development projects. I was the Capacity Development Program Manager and these were my projects until I left in April. One is to develop a training program for the Baghdad public works department. Another is to help the Anbar University revamp their engineering curriculum to meet US accreditation standards. Two more are to integrate Iraqi engineers into the reconstruction effort so they understand how to run projects to US standards. (Trust me: there are no Iraqi standards!) There were a couple more that I was trying to push through but evidently they've been cancelled for whatever reasons. Still, it was wonderful to see that these projects are alive and well, and to actually see Iraqis getting training in a program that I helped create. It makes me feel as if I really did contribute something to the effort.