Stacy Weitz Minch

  I don't know what's wrong with me lately, but I just can't seem to pull it together. This pose is oriented in the wrong direction to use sight size very effectively. And setting widths is always a weak point for me anyway, so it's not good news. I made the lower half of the body too long, so I'm trying to pull it in but I'm having to adjust every. single. line. And the drawing feels so disjointed. I want to start over, but there's little chance I'd do much better the second time. I'm just so discouraged about it all lately. It feels like maybe I'm just not quite good enough to make the effort worthwhile. I know that's not a productive mindset to be in. And I'm reminded quite a bit of how I rationalized myself into quitting the first time. But sometimes it's hard not to go there.

  I turned right around after arriving home from a long car trip and headed to structure class (when what I really wanted to be doing was taking a good long nap). I spent a few minutes doing a really quick sight size gesture to get the pose in my head... but I don't feel like it helped all that much. Just made me more frustrated when my 3-minute drawing was stronger than the one I spent three hours on, ha! Anyway, I keep drawing the heads too big, but I think it might have something to do with the angle I'm viewing my drawing from. I have the easel up pretty high to line up with the model, who is on a fairly tall stand, so the head is on the part of the paper that's farthest from my eye. Or maybe I just like to draw heads too big. Could be. I'm trying to figure out how to use the constellations as landmarks for setting proportion. I guess the hard part is knowing what and where to look for these things. Some models don't have super obvious skeletal landmarks surfaci

  I might spend a lifetime trying to figure out how to paint. And I might never really get there. But I've decided that it won't be for want of trying. I'm just going to keep at it. 20-30ish minutes on this little one.

  Just a really quick 5x7" sketch of the view... pretty good Sunday morning if you ask me :)

My drawing from structure class, the first of three sessions. I think I'm starting to get a slightly better handle on how to set proportions this way. And I like the feeling of freedom that comes from not measuring quite as much. My sight-size drawings are more proportionally accurate, but drawing this way feels less static and more intuitive. I just need to figure out how to combine the good of both.  I think I can, I think I can :) My goal in this session was just to get a solid block-in down that I'd be able to quickly build on in the next two sessions. We'll see how it goes. We're encouraged to start with long, loose lines and really move around the page to help create a feeling of oneness in the drawing from the beginning. A sculptor was asked how he knew when a sculpture was finished, and he said something like "when every part connects with every other part" (I'm probably totally botching the quote). But every part has to fit into the who

Our instructor is back in town. He turned off all the overhead lights and had me paint in the dark with a little natural window light to simplify the light source. I tried to correct the drawing with the new arrangement of the pear, but decided to not worry about it too much and just worked on the colors since I didn't have much time. Sorry for the horrible photos. It really was super dark in there.

  Sometimes I really wonder why I bother with all of this--I don't know how many more bad attempted drawings of this woman I can handle :P She's lovely. It's just me. I think my issue tonight was that I didn't have a clear end goal in mind. I think it's really important to have a solid idea of what you want to accomplish when you start out drawing. And it was a rather chatty night at the studio too ;)

  Some days my lines feel bold and confident... other days a little more fumbling and timid. Last night was more of the latter. I haven't really been on with my figures lately. My shapes are usually alright. It's just the finer aspects of light/shade/line quality, etc, where I get hung up. The dividing line between light and shadow was really soft here, and it's easier to define that separation when there's a strong contrast. 

We don't have a model coming in this week, so we're supposed to paint pears. I've painted a few pears before, and they're tricky little things. All those colors butt right up against each other and you somehow have to make sense of where they meet. I'm trying to keep the paint thin and flat so I can put more on top (since I'm sure I will have plenty of corrections to make). It makes me nervous to paint here because I know how high the standards are with regards to drawing, and painting is that much more complex. At this point, I'm pretty much 100% self taught when it comes to painting. I know there's a lot I need to learn, so I'll just keep throwing myself out there. I'm becoming convinced that the only way to learn is to keep making a fool of myself. Speaking of that... I squeezed all my paint onto my palette upside down today, genius that I am ;) I had never used the palette before (I use a glass tabletop palette at home), and it was j

I usually spend a few hours working on my Bargue project on Saturdays, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it yesterday. It's like pulling teeth right now, and I need to buckle down and do it so I can move on to casts--but finding the motivation isn't easy. Instead I stayed home and worked on an image that makes me want to paint :) This little Miss Beatrice. And isn't it a wonderful painting? (you can look up a really nice hi-res image of the original on wikiart if you aren't familiar with it). I love Sargent so much. I want to move like him when I paint. He's so fluid and lyrical, yet maddeningly accurate. I don't expect I'll ever paint anything like him, but I sure do wish I could--it doesn't hurt to shoot for the moon, does it? :) I learn a lot about his process by doing these copies--little things that I hope to be able to apply in my own work. He seems to put in the large masses in average values, then lay down darks/lights over and

Another figure flop :P I don't know. It started out alright. I blocked in the upper body really quickly and felt pretty good about the gesture, but spent the rest of the time trying to get those legs to look like they fit with the torso (and didn't spend much time at all on hands/face/feet, so...). Mostly I struggled with the proportions of the legs. I would measure, mark the midpoints and where they should end, then start drawing, and they kept ending up too long somehow. Part of the problem was that there were people seated with sawhorses in front of me, and I'm just not very tall. So a drawing board on a sawhorse in front of me blocks about a third of the figure from my view. Not that I shouldn't be able to figure out how to compensate for that. But I actually couldn't see the whole figure at once, so I'd be peeking around the drawing boards to see the legs, then going back to my drawing board, basically from memory, to draw them in the correct position

24x18", charcoal and graphite on white hahnemuhle ingres paper I had about 30 hours of drawing time on this long pose, and it seems that no matter how much time I have, it's never quite enough ;)

The model didn't show last night, so one of us artists had to sit for a portrait (or volunteer to take our clothes off--and can you believe that none of us were chomping at the bit? ;). We stood around waiting for the model to show for a little while--less than two hours isn't long to get a portrait down. As usual, I wish I had had more time.  Anyway, I've gotten pretty used to seeing this guy's face over the last couple years. In some ways, I think it's harder to draw people you are familiar with because it's so obvious to your mind when something is a little off. But theoretically, it could make it easier to capture character because you're more familiar with the person's expressions and such. Not saying I caught that here. I still had a long way to go with this one.

  Breaking in my new Soltek (happy birthday to me!) with some truly awful sketches of some very wiggly kiddos (gotta start somewhere--these are my first attempted portraits from life in oil, so... I thought maybe I should document the milestone? Ha :P).

It's the last few days of this pose and I'm almost starting to despise this drawing. Our regular teacher is out of town and we have a previous graduate filling in for critiques, which is a good thing (I think it's great to have multiple people critiquing your work). He's bringing up some things, though, that are a bit different in approach from what I've been doing. And it's making me realize that my mindset on this drawing has been pretty closed off for a while. I've heard someone say that you want to keep the drawing/painting open (or changeable) as long as possible. And this drawing (or my perception of this drawing) hasn't been. Maybe that's the consequence of focusing on shape. Or working sight-size where it's easy to get lost in the measurements. Or just of being inside my head--I've always had a tendency to get a little too microscopic, and sometimes I think working with such a focus on accuracy tends to magnify that. I don'

  I'm taking pictures of this to convince myself that I really am making progress. After a three hour session I'll look at it and think, "is this any different from when I started?" And the picture tells me it is, but it just feels like a whole lot of tedium. I'll get there eventually...

Figure from Thursday night. I've been in a bit of a funk this week with my drawing, so I didn't skip any steps with this one, and I think it paid off--I don't hate this one ;) I'd like to get to a point where these little studies are less an exercise in mechanics and a little more artistic on some level. Maybe someday--or not. Honestly I don't really care that much if I'm ever especially good at any of this (though of course it's what I'm aiming for and I would like to be...). I just really like doing it. So I'll keep on (even though sometimes I do get a little discouraged looking around at the high level some artists are capable of achieving). "Comparison is the thief of joy."

I apologize for the hideousness of this little study. I probably shouldn't post it, but this is my daily blog and it's what I worked on yesterday, so I'm posting it anyway. I've never done a color study before, but it seemed apropos, considering the color content of this image--it's all about the color. I've wanted to paint this scene since the first time I saw it and snapped some photos.  I've been doing so much copy work lately I'm sort of in the mood for something original... foolish though it may be ;)  This is one of my babies. Both were born with some jaundice, but my second had to lay on this little light bed all day for the first week of his life, and it was just so cool looking (and made a nice humming noise that kept him sleeping soundly)!  Anyway, obviously not much attention paid to drawing here, and I will probably do several more studies of that drapery before attempting anything on a larger scale. It's difficu

  There's something really nice about seeing my painting thoughtfully framed and hanging on someone's wall. That's the dream, right? :)

  Ack, off night for drawing last night. Which almost invariably happens when I'm low on sleep, and I could feel it from the first session. If I didn't keep this silly little weblog of all my  failed attempts I might not see the correlation, but Stacy on little sleep does not translate into successful attempts at drawing. At least I know.  Anyway, I spent a lot of time chasing (the pose shifted quite a bit from my angle--especially the tilt of the shoulders and and twist of the torso) and when you chase a part of the drawing without changing everything else in relation, you end up with an oddly pieced together conglomeration of parts. And I just don't know sometimes how to be fast enough to change everything together. Oh well. It was about time for me to turn out a real turkey ;)

What can I say? I really like Sargent :) I spent a couple more hours working this portrait last night, so I've probably invested 6-8 hours in this painting so far. I think once I get the portrait to a place I'm happy with, the rest of this will go really quickly. I blocked in the entire painting the first night I worked on it, and the original is pretty sketchy so I don't think it will take too much "finishing" work (though the painting did fall off my easel wet a couple weeks ago, so there are a couple areas that need a little tlc ;).

   Graphite on white stonehenge It's been a busy few weeks at my house. Three out of the four birthdays in our family happen within the same four-week period, and yesterday we had the second of the kids' birthday parties in the morning.  Once the party was over and cleaned up, I showed up at the studio to spend a few hours working on my Bargue project (which has been a little neglected lately). If I had better willpower I might have given it those few hours, but a portrait  model showed up an hour after I arrived... and that's just too hard to pass up ;)   I don't usually take comparison shots of my portraits, but here's one. The tilt's a little different... This one is on white paper, which seems like is a little bit more difficult to work on. Every stroke is so visible. But it's probably a good thing for developing better control. Or maybe not. I don't know.

Here's the conclusion of my 4-week (12-hour) structure drawing. I hope next time I can get the proportions down a little quicker--approaching setting the proportions a different way has been a bit of a learning curve. From last night's critique--my shadow value wasn't reading well, so we flattened that out with a brush (which also made the colerase pencil warmer--so weird, and it's also a learning curve working in a new medium). That softened out the whole drawing, and I went around trying to reestablish shadow boundaries, and look for and emphasize "points of rest," or where the outer forms connect with the inner skeletal structure. At those points there is a transition that helps define the sub-structure.  It's so interesting to see the differences in the approaches of the two different schools. And it's not so much that we don't touch on the same things both places, but that the emphasis is on different facets. The CAS is much more

This model has such a sweet beauty about her. She looks like she walked right out of a classical nude painting (sorry, classical friends--I may be using that word all wrong ;). Anyway, I'm enjoying doing some more of these quick little figures, trying to reorient myself to what I should be focusing on here. I've been doing so much detailed stuff in my larger figure studies. Somebody said that simplification is of utmost importance, and the last achieved in any art. Maybe DaVinci? I'm not always good at remembering where these thoughts in my head come from... Someone else said he no more remembered the books he had read than the meals he had eaten, but they had made him who he was. So I'm grateful for the things I've read and heard even if I'm a poor attributor if my thoughts--sorry, original sources (I also forget a lot of book and movie endings--just give me six months--filed away as useless info in my brain ;).