Week 2: This is a post about frustrations. You've been warned.

I knew this would start to get to me, and well, it's starting to get to me. And even though you know something is coming, you just can't be prepared for the onslaught of emotions. There's this part of me that knows I'm doing fine, I'm doing well. Really, I know that--I can't expect to do everything perfectly the first time (or ever). There's this other part of me that is screaming, "Run! Just get out now!!!!" The more you learn about something, the more you realize how much you are lacking. I have a sense for that. I can see how much I need to stretch to get better--it's daunting.

Let's start with the long pose. I've been really struggling with the portrait on this one. I'm not sure why I'm having such a hard time seeing it, but I am. And I can see what I'm not seeing, which is really frustrating. Aside from the portrait, I'm confused about the way I'm supposed to set the values. I'm not supposed to put any background into it (just draw the figure in isolation), which is confusing to me, because I look up and see the legs against a white sheet (which creates a lot of reflected light on the one side of the thigh), and the face against a dark shadow in the folds of the drapery, which changes the way the edges of those things would look in my regular field of vision, but wouldn't really make sense without that context. I'm setting all the values in the figure just relative to itself. So I'm supposed to compress all the dark values into a simple mass (darker than all the four figures on the left, similar to how a camera "clips" the values based on exposure), but not too dark, just dark enough so there is enough space in the lighter values to express most of the value variation in the drawing in the light shapes. Okay, so I try that (figure #5), and now I'm putting too much value into my light masses, creating too many visual concavities (and to me, it just looks like the girl has a bad spray tan or who knows what?). 

I guess what I want to do is match what I see up there, and granted, I do tend to see things over-exaggerated. But the mental manipulation of what I see is what is throwing me off--for instance, as I see it, the shadows on those legs aren't nearly so dark as I'm supposed to make them (now I'm supposed to over-exaggerate in order to simplify ;), so I turn them into a couple of black masses and from there, I just don't know where to go--darken everything else, I guess? But it just feels too dark to me. There are a lot of "supposed to's" here that frequently contradict each other and are doing a thoroughly good job of befuddling me in ways I didn't know possible. Hooray. Not to mention that everything is starting to feel so lifeless and overworked I can hardly stand it, and it's really hard to keep laboring over something you can hardly stand--but what's another 24 hours of my life? Okay, let's move on.

A couple more hours of work on this portrait here. Just pushing shapes around to improve the accuracy of the drawing. 5 hours in on this one. There should be two more sessions with this model, which means I have a lot of time to turn this into a total train wreck.

I had a choice of two Bargues--an easier one and this one, and I'm really regretting choosing this one about now :P This is misery. I'm not even kidding. The amount of space these things are off by is, like, less that 1/32nd of an inch in a lot of cases, but you move that 1/32nd of an inch and every other teeny tiny shape in the entire thing has to move to match and it's just really awful. Really, really awful. I guess the top tier of that crazy hair is at too much of an angle, so I'm going to need to pull it in and move every. single. little. shape. to the the right of it. Yikes.

Another faceless figure--don't ask.

Okay, I think I'm done venting now. Maybe I'll be in a better mood after the weekend--maybe. I'm going to try to just think about how grateful I am to be learning new things, and not focus on the struggle. Because I really am super grateful. But the struggle is real--and far be it from me to ignore reality ;)