Regency - work in progress.

Practice with a high key, cool palette. I was trying to use transparent acrylic though I've already got through a lot of titanium white with corrections and going too dark too soon. Reference is from NastiaOsipovaStock on deviantart.com

Christmas Pastels

No life drawing this week so some practice with colour. Hard pastel on velour. 18cm x 24cm

Just charcoal

First 3 three minute sketches

Long pose about one hour 30 minutes.

Experiments and deja vu

Experimented with wax pastels (water soluble) for the quick poses. I should have tried this before the session as the paper didn't do what I expected. Two 10 minutes on 15"x22" cartridge.

Long pose was almost identical to last week (I wished I was in a different place to get a variation). About 1 hour 40 minutes. Struggled with the face proportions might try correcting that to make her face look less flat.

Walks like an Egyptian

I thought the model today had an Egyptian look with her hair looking a little like Nefertiti's headdress. First a couple of 5 minute gestures. Still struggling to get the accuracy whilst capturing the feeling of the pose.

Long pose in charcoal and charcoal pencil. 1 hour 45 minutes.

Problems with contrast.

Four hours with the model and then another hour filling in a dark background. I'm noticing more and more the drying shift of acrylic to darker colours. This is leading to less tonal range and very few highlights. Need to be careful though as the titanium white is not the answer. Also the right hand and knee look plain wrong (seem to have stretched that area).

Trying to be different

but failing. I wanted to try something different this Saturday by using a more sketchy style and transparent paint. First a couple of 5 minutes.

Then I started the long pose with sanguine pencil on primed paper. This is after 45 minutes.

Unfortunately I then tried to fix the drawing using acrylic medium which just spread the drawing around. So I ended up using opaque acrylic as usual. Another 3 hours.

Painting from life

Need to come up with more original titles. 3 and one half hours, 24"x20" acrylic on canvas from life.

Main thought is that I need to be more consistent: shadows in the highlights too dark and similarly the highlights in the shadows need to be darker, but in doing this I don't want to lose the saturation of colour (which seems to happen when I paint over). Here was what it looked like after 1.5 hours (mostly drawing but in someways I prefer the colours).

Holiday paintings

Three painted on holiday, the last two from holiday photos.

Tess

One hour from life. A2 graphite.

From life

From life, about 1 hour 40 minutes.

Gouache

Some gouache sketches (and one longer study).

Tonight's session

OK, the quick poses were 3 minutes down to 30 seconds. Here you have me having too much time, simplifying, racing ahead, panicking and then accepting the time.

Bit of a gap

I haven't posted for ages as all my practice sketches looked the same. A couple on toned paper for a change. Need to concentrate on proportions whilst maintaining the sketchiness.