Stacy Weitz Minch

  I'm sure this isn't interesting to anyone but me, but... another 3 hours on this long pose ;) I think that brings me up to about 16-17ish hours on this one so far. It seems like most of the time I'm getting about 1.5 hours per session this month, which makes it kind of tough to see much progress between sessions. Sometimes it takes a few minutes just to get into the swing of drawing after all my other daily shenanigans too, so a full three hour block was nice. I tried to solidify the shadow shapes a bit today, paying closer attention to the little shifts and hard/soft transitions along the core shadow line. It will still need a lot more refining. Then I started moving into the light areas of the torso, blocking in the light shadows, which will also need so much more time to get the subtlety (kind of funny too how you have to watch carefully for the point in the breath cycle you're drawing--those shadows change a lot on inhale/exhale). I'm thinking there may be som

I have a couple little things I want to touch up, but I think I'm actually ready to quit working on this one this time. Not because I think it's a perfect copy, and not because I couldn't go on fixing little things about it for the rest of my life. But because I think there are some major things that could be fixed that would require almost an entire rework of the painting. And I don't think it's worth it. I'd rather start fresh with something new and let this one be what it is--a cooler (color temperature-wise) copy of an incandescent-lit photograph of a painting I've never seen in person ;) The nuance of expression isn't perfect and of course that drives me nuts, but considering my mistake-laden sketchy start (yikes), I think I did just about the best I could without working it to death. The color. I made a deliberate decision at one point to de-yellow the mix. And I've tried a couple times to warm it up after-the-fact because my teacher

  I really like this model, pose and all, but I'm almost regretting starting this drawing. It's just so hard to get time in this month because the schedule is so variable, and it seems like I get there right when long break is starting almost every time. So it feels like I'm pushing like crazy, but moving at snail's pace. Sounds like we will have a couple more weeks on it, so maybe I'll be able to come a little bit closer to a finish (if I'm lucky. I've lost my regular babysitter, so I really don't know at this point...).  But anyway, I'm just starting to try to push some of the darker areas down and get more specific about shapes and contours. Worked some on the portrait, too. The likeness really isn't too bad at this point, so that's nice. I actually really do care about making my drawing look like the model. Just making it look like a real person isn't my goal--I want it to be that face.

  I didn't capture the model's likeness on this one--I was fighting the drawing all the way through. But I didn't look at it for a couple days, and it's not quite as terrible as I was remembering, ha. I'm such a harsh critic of my own efforts, I know. Maybe it's a bad thing, but on the other hand, maybe it's what propels me forward. Mostly, I've been tired this week, and I never do as well when I'm tired. It feels like I've been burning my life candle at both ends, and it's probably just time for a little breather (and maybe a nap?). Yay for the weekend :)

  I wasn't feeling well last night, so I probably wasn't at the top of my game, and somehow it feels like this drawing just gets worse and worse the more I try to fix it, ha! I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting tired of looking at it. Or maybe (definitely ;) it was a bad start, and it's just hard to keep working a bad start. You have that many more problems than you have with a great start. Just one more week with this, so only a few more hours of wrestling this one ;) Anyhow, so I don't forget the night's critique: Colleen gets that feeling of solidity because she's not just drawing what she sees, but what she understands about how the body plane shifts relate to the light source (like a sphere). The lighting likely wasn't so dramatic on those figures you can see on the right of my board. She probably had a similar lighting situation to the drawing we are working on here, but pushed the value (as well as the pose/anatomy) in order to get the effect

  Here's a current photo of my Bargue project. I sketched the whole thing in without measuring more than a few points, then went around trying to reign in the shapes with a little measuring/refining, and now I'm starting with the upper torso and really trying to perfect things. Slowly working down. It feels pretty slow going, but I'll probably finish it sometime in the next year ;)

  It feels like it's been about 10 years since I've done a 2-hour figure... where have I been? I dunno. The portrait/head aren't even close, but oh well.

16x12" I spent a couple of hours working on this portrait last night (I know I said I wasn't going to try for the likeness, but eek, I can't help it). I think the placement of the features is a little better now, but the colors are pretty rough. The variation of value in the portrait is really subtle, and the form seems to be defined more by subtle color and temperature shifts than anything else. That's a difficult thing to replicate, especially while working from a little 8x12 photo print (next time, start the copy larger :P). How ever does he make it look so effortless? Ha.

  I forgot to take a picture of this three-hour portrait start on Wednesday. It's going alright so far, I guess. I was being pretty careful about trying to get things in the right place, and I'm sure I'll need to tweak it a bit when I see it with fresh eyes.. Drawing from life is so difficult. Sometimes I wonder why these open sessions aren't filled to overflowing with local artists. Why isn't everybody doing this? But that's me projecting my artistic goals on others, which really isn't fair. And when I think about how often I fall flat on my face during a life session, it makes a lot more sense, ha! I'm kind of kidding, but there's something nice about making your mistakes where nobody sees. When you're working from photographs, or just working in your own studio at home, you can just keep correcting and correcting until you're happy with it before anyone else sees. That's definitely more comfortable. And people are busy--I get that. But

  Week two on this pose. I'm not feeling great about the overall proportions of this drawing (where are those sight size tic marks when I need them? Ha!). And there's some definite mental stretching going on, trying to navigate between what I'm doing here and at the CAS. But I'm really enjoying getting acquainted with the different approach (even though it really feels like I'm floundering at the moment --in both places, really ;). I had some Colleen Barry drawings up next to my board for inspiration. I really love her stuff, and a couple of the teachers there studied with her at the GCA. She tells her students they should be able to lock in the gesture 3D in their heads (by imagining the simple forms of the rib cage and pelvis in relation to each other--gesture is all about the torso at his school), so that they could draw it from any angle, and that she's pretty good at doing it. Also that she holds the end of her pencil at arm's length and really lets it

Just a couple little copies for my structure class--I think I'm behind on the homework. Now I should dig out my old human anatomy textbook and try to figure out the names of those muscles (I knew them once... so they should come back quickly, right?). The way the foot (and maybe knee?) are positioned on that left leg seem a little weird to me... don't know if it's the plate or my copying (probably my copying--quite a few distractions around here, and it really wasn't a very good day to begin with). I had a little help from my three year old on the right there ;) 

  This drawing is getting the better of me right now. I'm feeling so self-conscious about the way I'm drawing that I'm just fumbling through :/  Looking at this photo, I'm feeling like the front leg (from the knee down) is floating just a little too high--not quite planted on the ground. That's something I can fix.  But procedurally, I'm feeling a little paralyzed, like I can't trust myself at all. I guess I'll just have to push through the paralysis and see how it goes, bleh.

I felt like throwing some paint around last night, so I decided to start another little Sargent copy (and yes, I must be crazy ;). Still haven't finished that other one yet, but I'm planning on this one being a sketchier copy. I'll definitely go back in and refine the portrait and the hand, and add more paint in the clothing/puppy. But I don't think I'll spend a ton of time on this, and I'm just not really that concerned about it being a perfect likeness. I'm playing around with the limited palette (and gettring a brief break from drawing). This start was about two hours of painting. Sargent wasn't afraid to use black. I like that. I spent some time painting without black because someone told me that that was what I was "supposed" to do. All the "supposed-to's" :P  I decided to grid the drawing in order to simplify the process, and doesn't that make drawing faster? I probably spent 5-10 minutes blocking this in (whi

I'm about 5 hours in on this drawing, and there are plenty of issues I need to work through. It took me a while to place that hanging arm, because where I'm standing, the slightest movement really changes the foreshortening and it was difficult to get it in place--I'm sure it will need a little more nudging. The head's not at all right at the moment, but I like it tilted down, and one of the other students was working on the portrait with the head tilted up today, so I didn't get a chance to work that area of the drawing.  I started with a chief line, and sort of combined the approaches of the two different schools of thought I've been learning. But I had some issues with the rhythm--I made the mistake of breaking the lines up too much, seeing too much detail early on, and over-exaggerating the small undulations of the contour (which isn't an uncommon problem for me. I want to make the beginner's mistake of moving from form to form instead of se

I wrote a couple of long paragraphs about this and accidentally deleted what I had written! I don't feel like typing it all out again. But long story short, it took some work (and a little help ;) to arrive at the proportions here. The bony landmarks are hard to see on this model for all that thick, broad muscle. And thinking about the three dimensional shapes from the beginning (versus the flat visual impression) is going to take some getting used to.  Oh, and looking at crazy good drawings is really fun, but can also make me wonder why I even try, ha... Maybe I'll copy a couple of these types of things to get this kind of shape/form making into my head. That's probably a good plan.

We had another session with Ian last night, and I attempted to correct the proportions in the face. The proportions may be better, but there's something uncomfortable about the drawing to me now--feels slightly overworked. I'm not saying it's super terrible or anything, but it's difficult to change proportions after putting as much value down as I had. I think I really have to nail those proportions in the initial block-in to get the quality I'm looking for in my drawing. I had some issues with all the features feeling a little too short, and probably what was going on was that I made everything too wide (which is my most common error), and it made everything feel too stubby. Yesterday was another one of those discouraging days--not for any particular reason. My drawings are going fine, things are fine. I think I'm just a little too aware of how much work there is between me and where I want to be (and how difficult it is to fit it all in). It can se

8x10 12-minute sketch I did of my baby while he slept in the car yesterday afternoon (I know, because I was counting down the minutes until my daughter came out of her dance class as I furiously sketched ;). And is this angel face the same one that unrolled three rolls of toilet paper, dumped and scattered a brand new box of fruity pebbles all over the kitchen, pulled all the stuffing out of one of the couch cushions, squirted a bottle of lotion onto the carpet behind the bed, and in general, caused mass chaos the rest of the day through? Why, yes it is :) For the aforementioned reasons, I didn't get much else done in the way of art stuff yesterday (I've been trying to make time to push a little more paint around on that Sargent copy, but it's just not happening). Anyway, this quick little sketch is actually not a bad likeness (for 12 minutes, anyway)--though, as usual, I wish I had had a bit more time--to refine the head shape and placement of the ear (the propo

Rough block-in of my final Bargue copy. I love/hate taking comparison shots of these things, because it makes the errors so obvious. This is going to be... fun! :P ;)

Just some quick torso plate copying. I'm trying to be as accurate as possible without getting too meticulous about it--I'm getting enough meticulousness on my Bargue copies, so I'm just keeping these loose.  I'm really liking this idea of carrying a line through to the other side of a shape right now. That concept really started making sense on the first night of this structure class when Niki, one of the instructors, quickly demonstrated it on my drawing. It's funny because I swear I've been told to do that many many times before, but it just clicked that day. Probably because he showed me by doing it on my existing drawing. I'm the most visual of learners, and when I saw how it could be implemented on what I had already laid down, it made a lot of sense.  I guess what I like about the draw-through is that it not only makes finding the shape easier and more harmonious/fluid, it gives a feeling of freedom and movement. I have a tendency to get a

  2-hour drawing from a 3-hour session yesterday. I had to start over after an hour or so of drawing--my shapes were bad, and I couldn't seem to resolve them without moving everything --sometimes it's better just to have a fresh start. I don't think I've ever regretted bagging a bad start. This is the same model we drew on Wednesday, and it was nice to be somewhat familiar with her face already. I still need to work on my value organization--it's so hard to keep those values under wraps. Pencil is difficult value-wise, because you really can't copy one for one--one for one value matching is much more doable with charcoal or paint. But with pencil, you have to make it about relationships. It's a difficult thing for me to do... which is why I should probably do it a lot more ;) Something I should not do a lot more is cruise Instagram for new people to follow (don't you love those little suggestion boxes? ha). There are way too many incredible

  Yesterday was the last day of this long pose. When all is said and done, I only got about 20 hours of drawing in on it--could have spent a lot more. But since I knew I was short on time, I gave each of those hours my full sprint, and worked through a good portion of the model breaks, so no regrets here. But I have quite a few things I'm going to try to better next month.

  6-hour drawing with prismacolor colerase pencil on strathmore 400 paper. This is from the evening structure class I'm taking. I think it's slightly wide overall, but oh well. This was our last night with this model, and I'm hoping I can get a little further with the next pose. Pushing beyond this point and getting into the specifics and subtleties of form is somewhere I need to get comfortable existing. They passed around a book of Russian academic drawings last night, and the way those guys bring out all the little intricacies of form is incredibly beautiful. In this structure class the emphasis is on identifying the major anatomical points (constellation) and sweeping gesture (chief line) of the figure before laying in the contour, whereas the school I attend during the day focuses first on arriving at the gesture by chiseling into the contour from the outside envelope. I like both ways of approaching the drawing, and I think combining them is totally possible. I'm

I wish I had taken a couple progress shots of this one, because I'm happier with how it started out than with how it ended. The drawing was going fairly well until I started trying to lay in more value (surprise! I'm starting to notice a pattern here ;). It's just in that stage where you have to push and pull between shape and value impression for a while. This was just a one-night pose, so I won't have a chance to bring it to a more resolved place, but that's alright. This lady's bone structure was killer.

Last night's figure. Again, I get to a place where I'm feeling pretty confident about the shapes (except maybe that rear leg/foot, now that I'm looking at it), but when I get into value I get a little lost. I seem to stop at an awkward spot--somewhere between taking the value a little too far and not quite far enough. This is a really great model, though. Such nice lines in his figure.