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.