Stacy Weitz Minch

10x8" on board When I was growing up, the two acre lot around our house was surrounded by lilac bushes, and sometime in May they would all come into bloom at the same time. It smelled like Heaven (and if Heaven isn't teeming with lilacs, I'm outta there--that is if I get there in the first place ;). They're probably my favorite flower, and unfortunately so short-lived in the scheme of a year. Anyway, the last couple years around this time (they bloom about a month earlier in UT!), my nostalgia has set in and I've had an urge to paint the sweet little things. Which is trouble because they are really quite difficult to paint, if you're asking me. But still, I give it a try because I'm (almost) always up for an impossibly difficult challenge. This was about 2 hours of painting, and it would have been nice to have a little more time (although, honestly, I'm not sure it would have helped much). I'm feeling a little rusty with my painting l...

Well, this was a mess (the shapes of those legs and feet were eluding me, and the overall proportions too...). But now wouldn't my life be dull if I could just whip out a good drawing anytime I felt like it? Ha ;)

Another Bargue figure of this cute, skinny little guy. It feels like I was working on this one forever--I had to come back to it in several short chunks of time (busy weekend!). It's kind of hard to do it that way because it usually takes me a few minutes to get in the "zone" and by the time I'm there, something draws me away (usually quarreling kids, ha! Someday, I'm sure they will get a long perfectly ;). Anyway, at least when things are busy I can find a few minutes to sneak in here and there. And this kind of copy is much more conducive to that kind of working than some other things (like big, scary, multi-figure paintings).

Last night's figure. I made a bit of a last-minute effort to adjust the size of the head and move the shoulders down, so that area still feels a little messy to me (I always want to put those darn shoulders too high!).  Overall, though, it went alright last night. I made a concerted effort to get a quick block-in right away this time instead of getting sucked into zoning in on specific little areas. The right foot is looking a little off to me--maybe a bit small or floaty somehow--or both :P 

6x6", oil on canvas panel, 4/20/16 Aside from the steaming bag of dog poop 10 feet away (I really wish I would have spotted it BEFORE setting up, painting, and taking down--such a pleasant day apart from that occasional whiff of what is that!? ;), this was actually pretty fun. (And people, if you bother to pick up the poo, please at least walk it over to the garbage can. Really).  I like painting from life, though like other living things I've encountered, nature doesn't stand still. There's something invigorating about painting in real time, though, as opposed to staring at a static photograph. I really needed a little break from that special kind of tedium. My main focus was trying to match value/color here. Drawing was a bit secondary (and I left out the fence and row of houses on the horizon there. It seems you have to be a bit selective when doing landscape painting--especially when painting this small. There's just so much out there. Note ...

This one was a bit of a struggle at first (that is, until Brock came and blocked some of it in). It went a little better after that.  I dunno. There are a myriad of things to remember during the course of these drawings, and it can be a little overwhelming. I try not to overthink and get stuck in proverbial ruts. But it happens.  It's funny how it always just comes back to learning to simplify. Why is that so hard?

By some small miracle, I ran across this quote from Cecilia Beaux the other day: "In every picture I've painted there came a time when it was impossible to continue. There was a hill I couldn't climb. It's then when that pressure bears down on the solar plexus, that you must keep  on !" I had reached that point of pressure on the solar plexus, and I was about ready to call it quits (which I really hate doing, by the way. I am NOT a quitter). But thank you so very much, Cecilia, for giving me the nudge I needed to go on. I'm going to finish this painting , and while it might not match the masterpiece I had initially created in my head, I will try my very hardest to make it a cohesive, sensical whole. I still have a long way to go, but maybe the next time I post here it will be nearly finished. I'm going to give myself a break (and a pat on the back) for being courageous enough to try and then see it through. Perhaps it's a bad idea to be so ambi...

In an attempt to motivate myself yesterday, I was scrolling through a bunch of inspirational quotes on Pinterest (yep, I was in serious need of some inspiration), and came across this one: So I'm trying one more time today. And maybe I'll try one more time tomorrow. But occasionally I find myself sitting against the wall in my little dormer-window painting corner just wishing this thing would paint itself. Sometimes it seems like the more I work on something, the worse it gets, but then again, maybe it's just me getting grumpy about the whole thing. I know doing nothing won't make anything better. I have about a zillion ideas for paintings (if I had a dollar for every time the thought "I wanna paint that!" has run through my head...), and sometimes when I try to let those visions loose and find my skills sorely unfit for the job, it's more than a little frustrating :(  I'm a firm believer that in order to learn to do something, you ...

This was a fun one with all that drapery. I think I may have gone a little overboard with the shading, but the drawing went a little faster last night than it sometimes does (I think the sheet formed a nice natural envelope so it wasn't quite as difficult to visualize ;), so I started shading. Also, didn't quite get the portrait quite as well as I would have liked, but oh well. I've been trying to get a little sketching done throughout the day (especially on days when I'm going figure drawing), so I'll be warmed up before jumping into a figure drawing. So, here's a silly little sketch of a ceramic pitcher (10 minutes or so) from yesterday afternoon. I don't usually pencil sketch inanimate objects (people are so much more interesting, right?!), but I should do it more. They don't move, which is always a plus.

Eeek, this is getting sticky. I'm really, really, really trying to resist the urge to trash it right here. I mean, I probably should :P But on the other hand, there are probably some lessons to be learned in attempting to resolve it, so maybe I'll keep at it a little longer... The darks are completely dry now and looking flat, which makes the whole thing blah. Also, the flesh tones on Steve's face were too thin, so I was building up some paint on the face, then decided it wasn't right and wiped it off. Don't pay any attention to that crazy hand over there--I just madly threw some paint on it, but it needs a lot of work (and probably to be scraped down completely). Yikes. Maybe I will find a few more minutes to work on this today, but geeeeee, I have a long way to go, and I'm not feeling very excited about it at this point. Wish me luck, patience, or the good sense to let it go right here, ha ;).

I had a little issue here with the plumb of my board, which was making my measurements just a little askew, but other than that, this one went much better than last week :) Maybe it's all the perfect weather and lying out in the grass cloud-gazing while the little ones play that's got me in a better mindset (or maybe a little bit better sleep?). Or perhaps all my crazy speed drawing efforts this weekend, ha. Whatever it is that changed, I'm a lot happier with this one. So, I'll be ready for a flop on Thursday :P It seems to be a little up and down at this point, but I guess that's to be expected. And for comparison purposes, here is one of the same model from September of last year. My proportions are getting much better (and lines less warbly), ha ;)

6x6", water mixable oil on gessobord, 4/11/16 I often intend to get much more done during the day than I can realistically accomplish, and yesterday was one of those days. There was that stick of butter smeared all over the floor (so slippery!), the mud dragged in from the back yard, all the weekend laundry to get done, no nap for the little one, and the list goes on. So when 9:45pm came around and I still hadn't done anything artistic throughout the day (though I did work a little bit on improving my plein air setup--the easel I got last year needed a little reinforcing to be functional, especially after my experience last Saturday where everything that could have gone wrong did, ha!)--I decided to just grab an apple and paint for a bit, even though it was late (this one was about a 40 minute study). Apples tend to be my default subject matter. We always have them around (we eat a TON of apples around here), and they're quick little studies. Not too intensive on th...

I went out to try a little plein air painting yesterday, but the forces of nature were not in my favor (wind, sun, rain, you name it--I didn't come up with anything worth sharing--and that's saying something, since usually I'm not one to gloss over my painting fails--I wiped the board off before even packing up, ha). So, here we are back with the Bargues. Doing these is feeling a little bit like a security blanket these days ;) Below is my five-minute start. I was fairly satisfied with it (it was only my 5th or so time starting this same pose and my paper had just about had it ;) so I went ahead and finished the drawing up a bit. It's not perfection, but it's moving in the right direction. Now, to apply the same process to drawing from life... :)

After last night's figure drawing, I decided I just needed to try to loosen up a bit.  First, from this morning, 15-second sketches of my 2-year old. He doesn't hold still, even for 15 seconds ;)   Second, Bargue figures. I do apologize to Mr. Bargue--I'm fairly sure this is not how he intended his figures to be used. I promise I'll make a more careful copy later :) But my goal here was to get the lines down quickly and without a lot of fuss. And I'm pretty sure I got the quickly part down--still a little more fuss than I was going for (and too extreme in the the angles! straight lines, straight).  I went from 20, to 10, to 5-minute copies, which is probably a little backward from your usual gesture exercises, but I had to ease into drawing that fast. And no, they are not accurate. I did my best in the short amount of time I allotted myself. Ouch, the envelope on that last one--too wide, Stacy! Too wide (always too wide). \ I migh...

Okay, off-night number two. I'm going to skip the part where I try to analyze what went wrong and how I could have fixed it, and just say I'll try again next time.

One of my neighbors asked me the other day how on Earth I ever get anything artistic done with two little kids at home. She said she would love to do something like that, but there's always something else to be done. And isn't that the truth? There is always, always, always something else I could be doing other than paint (or draw).  I've just had to figure out where my priorities lie (which quite honestly, has not been an easy process) and let the other things go. The floors don't get washed or vacuumed more than once a week (if that), there are toys everywhere all the time, and we don't have a very elaborate or consistent bedtime bath routine (one of my friends the other day was saying how they only wash their kids' hair every other day, and I was thinking, Do I even remember the last time I washed the kids hair ? ha). I do what I can to simplify, and I still only have a few minutes here and there to do what I want to do. My husband has this little sa...

Last night was an off-night for me. My husband says I'm too hard on myself and he thinks this is a perfectly good drawing :) And, you know, he's probably right--at least about me being too critical of myself ;) I think the way I perceive my drawings is sometimes related to how much frustration I feel while creating them. I like things to feel at least somewhat under control. Sometimes I get into a rhythm of drawing, where I can look back and forth between my drawing and the model and quickly evaluate what's going on and make adjustments, but last night I was just dragging. I was tired--it's spring break this week, and it's thrown off our whole daily schedule, which I've learned is VERY important with small children. Exhaustion never bodes well for my artistic attempts :P The first line of a Thoreau poem kept coming to mind: "I am a parcel of vain strivings, tied by a chance bond together". (it's a great poem. go check it out). Not usually...

Nothing too exciting here. This painting is sloooow going. The last thing I was working on was warming up that white just a little on the baby's face and adding a few highlights on Steven's.  I spend about half my time deciding whether I'm crazy or not for trying to do this stuff (after all, I have a perfectly decent photo of this exact scene, ha!), but not doing it doesn't seem to be the  answer either, so here I am :)

Alright, it's getting tricky (as it always does). I'm going to do my best not to get crazy frustrated and toss it in the garbage :P "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming, swimming, swimming" (thank you, Dori)... I'm using a photograph as a reference for this painting, and the photograph may be a little overexposed--the skin tones are really light. And when I make the skin tones as light as the reference photo, they look so cool in temperature. So I feel like I'm going to need to overexaggerate the warmth in the shadows and where the light meets the shadow to compensate. Also, I had placed the baby's face totally wrong--it was about 3/4 of an inch too far to the right. So it took a few times of redrawing and wiping it out, just to get the placement down. Now I'm fighting to keep the baby looking like she has the breath of life in her, while maintaining the ultra fair skin tone :/ The variations in skin tone are so, so subt...

It's Friday! And April fool's day (sorry, no clever pranks ;). The last figure of March. I took Brock's advice and ditched the plumb line early on. It was good advice (though I did have one major issue with the placement of the left foot in the process). But not having the plumb there made it so I was relating all the lines in the figure to each other instead of the plumb, which was a good thing. Also still working on trying to be a little less extreme with my breaks, or where the lines change direction.