Stacy Weitz Minch

Copy drawing after a portrait study by Michelangelo. I like how he downplayed the shadows and focused on the form of the features. I was trying to be a little more careful about the direction of my lines, attempting to follow the form like he does (though he was using a softer black chalk, so there's definitely a different feel). Such a beautiful drawing.

4x6", oil on linen mounted to hardboard Quick sketch of a wild rose I clipped from a bush in our backyard. I've started keeping a cigar box loaded with paint in the freezer at all times. It's so much easier to find a few minutes to paint when setup is taken out of the equation.

Here's a painting I started as a quick sketch last week, and ended up working on for a few days in a row. Oddly enough, the part of the painting I feel like I'm struggling with most is the background. I'm letting it dry now, and I'm going to give it another go to see if I can't salvage it. 

I was pretty happy with how the likeness developed on this one (is it just me or are bearded men always easier to draw?). I'm also loving the focus on form in this class. We talked quite a bit about form light and highlight and how those things are related (or not so much related). Form is an area that I need some definite guidance, so I'm really glad I'm taking this class.

I had a pretty good block-in for this drawing, and it feels like it just got worse the more I worked on it. Maybe I need to use charcoal for portraits--it seems like I want to go darker than what pencil can handle. Or maybe I need to get better at handling the values without going dark with the graphite. I don't know. I'm just not very happy with this one (though, like I said, the placement of the features and the proportions were pretty decent from the first 20 minutes).

Horrible photo quality here, but this is my current cast project in progress. It feels like I'm getting close to the finish, but I need to address the entire drawing, paying special attention to turning the form and giving it a "sculptural" quality. So more specific information as to how the forms turn away/toward the light. The shapes/impression are there. I've heard some people say that they love finishing--it's the funnest part for them. For me, it's the most grueling. I think I see more impressionistically, so finishing is just really difficult and tedious. Starting's the fun part for me.

First night of structure portrait class tonight and it was something of a disaster. I haven't really drawn a portrait from this angle before, and it was throwing me off--my proportions were all over the place. I've been introduced to a new method of measuring where you mentally impose a grid on your subject's face, and then measure within that grid (which I'm trying to wrap my mind around). Harold Speed talks about physically making a grid with cardboard and string to help you find proportions. Maybe that's what I need to do? At any rate, this is only a two-week pose, so I think I may draw a little grid around the photo of this model and see if I can't do a little fixing before class next week. What a mess :P

about 10x7.5", watercolor on 140lb hot press artistico fabriano paper Watercolor has a glowing quality to it that no other medium has... I'm going to try to use it more often, partly because it cuts out so much of the prep/cleanup time compared to oils (and I'm always short on time), and partly because I just like the way it looks (even though I know no one takes watercolor seriously--oh well).

2 hour figure from tonight. I think the overall proportions and likeness are pretty good. Still just need to figure out a better way of attacking the values while working in pencil. I have a hard time stripping the image down to the most simple elements of light and shade. I think because the pencil is such a tiny point, it's hard to fill in all the masses satisfactorily, just for the fact that it takes so long to build up the value. So I typically end up trying to render an area more completely and then it feels out of place, so I jump around a bit and half-finish other parts, but maybe it would be better to just go ahead and try to fully render one area for the 2 hours and just see how far I get. I don't know.

I'm not a huge tomato eater, but I couldn't resist these beautiful tomatoes at the grocery store last night. And then i couldn't resist picking up my brushes and painting them when i should have been in bed ;)

My mother's day project, picking up the pencil whenever I had the chance (and a majority of it having been done while my 3 year old flooded the back patio with hose water). The proportions are a little off here and there, but it was an interesting copy to do. You can tell that so much care was taken in arranging the composition, which I think is something that isn't quite so prevalent in painting today. 

Watercolor is such a tricky medium to work in, especially if you have to work quickly--everything bleeds into everything else. Which is why I'm so in awe of Sargent's watercolors. They are incredible. It appears he worked quite quickly on location on many of them, and was able to control the medium much better than I did here (ha!). I'm a little rusty with the watercolors anyway (though I can't say I ever had a great command of them). But now that I'm used to oil painting (which I can be very lazy about--it'll sit in the same spot you put it till it dries), I think I'm less adept at handling what this fluid medium is going to do. Anyway, watercolors are just so much more convenient than oils. I'd like to get a little more proficient at using them, and practice would be the way to do it (though there are so many things I want to do right now). "You can't do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh." -Sargent ...

Night one one this portrait from life. I feel like I blocked in a fairly good likeness pretty quickly with this one (which was nice since I ended up tossing the portrait I was working on earlier in the day). Next week I need to clean it up and tie all the values together. I think I can, I think I can... :)

I was feeling a little discouraged earlier this week, and decided it would be good to shake things up a bit. Instead of the usual Thursday night figure at school, I headed over to the studio of Casey Childs for his Thursday night session. Painting feels so much more intuitive to me than drawing right now, which seems weird. But I think it may just be that nobody has been giving me any instruction in painting, so it is very intuitive (not that what I've been doing with drawing doesn't carry over--it definitely does. it's just different).  It's just me in my head at this point. And I guess that's good for now. I don't have a lot of complaints about how this turned out. I like it. It bears a good likeness to the model, and feels like something I would paint (and hey, I did ;).

image from the Met's online collection I've always had such a fondness for Van Gogh--occasionally I need a good dose of his paintings. I'm sure there are plenty of people who wouldn't share my affinity for this artist (though there are surely many more who do, based on his popularity). His drawing is poor (if you don't believe me, look at his paintings of people), his ability to express form is lacking, and his shapes are generally quite flat and outlined in cartoon style (which is actually kind of charming, but from what I understand, most of his contemporaries were appalled by his work). And yet, I can't help but love it. His colors can be really stunning--and there's just something so personal and alive about the way he applies that paint. His iris paintings are some of my favorites. He was a melancholy soul, Van Gogh, and some days, I can relate on some level (can't we all?). Maybe that's a large part of what makes him so appealing. ...

Start of a portrait. I'm pretty sure I was in someone else's spot, so I don't know if I'll get another go at this one. The evening figure model had canceled, so the model from the afternoon portrait session stuck around another couple of hours. It never hurts to get a little more practice blocking in, though I do wish I had had a little more time to work out some of the proportional issues here. It seems like I always want to make things too wide. Her head could probably use  a little more vertical length--probably shaved off a little of her skull up top :P

Drawing kids from life is a challenge. They don't hold still for 15 seconds, much less 15 minutes ;) But it's an interesting exercise in mental averaging and being quick and decisive in what I put down. When I know I have 3 hours, I'm probably much less direct, and sometimes I think my portraits could use more of that frank quality. This is probably really good practice (and sometimes seems to be all I can find time for).

11x14", oil on panel, 1.5 hours I decided to venture out and do a little plein air painting this afternoon.I kind of like where the clouds were going here, but painting mountains is really tricky (especially when the cloud shadows on the mountain change so quickly!).I was at a park and there were all sorts of soccer goals, jungle gyms, and other structures that I didn't really want to include in the picture. Which left me to invent the foreground and it's feeling a bit bland. Maybe next time I go out and do plein air painting, I will try to choose a more zoomed in scene that I can copy more faithfully. Painting outside is hard enough without having to make it up ;) Maybe I should have drawn a little footpath in there or something (not that I still couldn't...). Definitely the worst part of plein air painting is gathering all the materials to go out, and then carting them all back (plus a wet painting and palette!) when finished.

I spent a few hours working on this cast this afternoon. It was a stormy day and the light was changing a lot. I mostly worked on the upper brow area. It's hard to see how all those forms come together under the brow, especially when I back up--as you can see in the photo the darker values all blur into a big blobby mass from farther back. And then when I'm up close, the angle I view the cast from doesn't match the drawing. So I can get closer to the cast and line the plumb up in the right spot and try to memorize where things should overlap/meet, but I have to commit it to memory and then head back over to my drawing and quickly try to get it down. I guess what I'm saying is I can't stand at my drawing and look at the reference. It's all a memory game, which is a little bit difficult. But I'm trying. The eye needs some work. First it was too small, and now I think I may have overcorrected and made it too big. I probably need to pull in some of the cont...

Haha, a month or two ago I was perusing the local thrift store with the kids, and came across this beauty school mannequin in the toy department. It has real human hair :o and isn't really very lifelike, in my opinion. But I thought she might hold still and let me paint her ;) And she does. But painting portraits is sort of really, really hard. I think it was in a John F. Carlson book that I read something along the lines that a good picture is nothing but a series of good corrections. And I was correcting and correcting and correcting here (mostly the drawing, of course--the color I may worry about later). Which sometimes feels a little discouraging, but that's just what it is. Correcting. Over and over and over. At least the setup is very repeatable. And I guess $4.99 was a pretty reasonable unlimited model fee ;) Also, I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing, but that doesn't mean I won't eventually, right? Except for one 20 minute attempt at painting my k...

Another ranunculus sketch. This one was pretty quick, maybe 30 minutes or so.

Two week (6 hour) drawing from structure class. I'm not too happy with the proportions here. I think the head is (still) a little too big. What is it with me and head size? Ha. And the lower body feels maybe a little truncated in comparison with the top half (which may partially be the result of having the top half of the board angled away from my eye on the horse?). Drawing from the horse makes it harder to get the proportions right, so I guess maybe I need to make sure I have a path to back up once in a while, which I didn't this time because I was backed up right in front of a couple other easels (I wanted to be as far back as I could). In any case, this was the last night of this session, so that's that.

We had our last session with this beautiful model last night. I had a lot of fun working the hair in the last session and fine tuning the facial features. I actually like this one (which doesn't happen all too often, ha ;). It's about 15x22" I think.

I spent most of my time trying to get the gesture of the torso looking right. And then the last 40 minutes came around and I tried to fill the rest in, but it didn't go too well ;) I have the hardest time drawing this particular model's face. I don't know what it is about her features, but I find them very difficult to capture. Also, I kept trying to elongate the head/shoulders area for some reason. I'd erase and try again and just end up doing the same thing again, ha! Oh, well. Perhaps that's the result of staying up too late the night before with out of town visitors ;)

45-minute copy sketch after Raphael. It's not terribly accurate, but I was going for the spirit of the drawing more than the letter. It was a fun little exercise, though I really would like to be accurate AND expressive ;) charcoal on Canson Ingres paper.

5x7" This is just a quick 45-minute sketch of a ranunculus I picked up at the grocery store this morning (keep me away from that floral section! ;). When I bought it, it was all curled up, but magically opened up in the warm car on the drive home. I preferred the shape partially-closed, but I'm hoping it might close back up overnight... if not, there's another tiny bud that I assume will eventually bloom. The colors are so vibrant and beautiful, though! I've started using more of a reductive drawing process for starting floral sketches. I like some tone in the background, but I don't like it where the petals will be--it muddies the color. And drawing with a thinned brown or gray paint does the same thing. So I draw with my paper towel, and it's just kind of fun and fast. Anyway, I've got my eyes set on a few more master copies that will guide me in the direction of pulling it into a tighter finish when that's what I want. 

Happy May Day! I finally took my new Soltek out yesterday (to the side of the house--I'm so adventurous ;). And I painted some lilacs. This was probably an hour to an hour and a half or so of painting. I could be happier with this painting--seems like I could have been using a larger brush for those blossoms, because they're feeling a little too broken up, especially in the shadows. But, that's alright. At least I painted. And next time I'll have some ideas on what to do differently. That's what I like about painting small and often (though often hasn't been often enough lately, mostly just Sundays--my time is spread pretty thin these days). But there's always next time to build on what I learned last time. And I also like analyzing what I did afterward and writing it down, so I can refer to my last painting and push a little further with each attempt.