Portrait and long pose in progress

 

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 as for me, I want to throw all my weaknesses out on the table and hope that the people I'm surrounding myself with can help me through them. It's definitely a humbling experience, and not too fun a lot of the time. But the growth is worth it, and I've always really valued working from life. Not that I don't work from photographs here and there, but there's something very different about the immediacy of working from life, and I want to do it really well. So I'll just keep on embarrassing myself ;) Let's hope I can not completely ruin this start in the next session. It's usually when I start laying in value that things really go south.

 

Speaking of value, I'm beginning to develop the value impression of this long pose. It's feeling a little scary right now, but hoping I can pull it together next week.