Stacy Weitz Minch

Oh happy day! I finished this beast of a Bargue plate this week. And just look at all those crisp, beautiful shapes ;) This is some tedious stuff, but I really do think it's improving my ability to see and correct shape, value, and edge--well worth the misery and frustration. Next will be a charcoal, which I'm sure that will bring its own set of frustrations.

This is the part where I get really discouraged and think, "I will never finish this thing."  The part where the adjustments are so minor that only the most astute observer would notice them. The part where after 3 hours of staring at this stone face, I can't see an ounce of difference in what's on the page since I started.  I think doing the Bargue exclusively this month has been a little mentally exhausting. And this week there haven't been any figures or anything to break up the monotony, so I'm just tired. And I'm coming down with a cold.  So I called it a night a little bit early tonight and that's fine. I'm sure I'll be a little bit happier the next time I post about this bearded friend (hoping that will be the finish. I'm optimistically shooting for finishing this by the end of 2016?). We'll see.

I'd like to get a better handle on the anatomy of the eye, and this seemed like a good place to start... and I was ready for something at which I might be able to feel somewhat successful. These aren't extremely careful copies--maybe 5-10 minutes per eye. Also didn't space my grid too carefully, ha :P But I'm just trying to get a better mental map of all the different lines/planes of the eyeball. They're complex little things.

I started bringing some of the values down this week so I could get a more solid handle on the shapes (it's kind of hard to see if they're correct when they're light in value). It's always a little scary, because once you start adding more pigment to the paper, it's harder to lift. So I'm trying to be pretty careful about where I darken things so I won't regret it later. It's also a point where it starts to feel like it'll get worse before it gets better--just because it starts to feel somewhat disjointed. I can only go so fast, so it's not all going to be united in value for a bit, and I really have to trust myself moving forward. I started at the top of the head because that was one place I felt pretty confident in my shapes (and because I figured it would make sense logistically to move from top to bottom, just for the practicality of smudging things on the way down). But my instructor felt like procedurally, it would make more sense ...

Okay, this is after day 7? of working on this guy. It just gets more and more fun, ha. Hoping I've made a little progress in the past few days ;) Out of curiosity, I was searching google for the statue this may have been drawn from. This was the closest one I could find. Super interesting. Although maybe it was a reproduction of the one here that Bargue used. I don't know. There are some notable differences.

I sat around doodling on this portrait for a little while this afternoon, trying to remember enough about the form to give it a little more finish. It would have been a lot easier with the model in front of me. Pretty sure I lost some of the likeness along the way and overdid it with that white. It is what it is.  Before/after I'm almost in the mood to quit this stuff altogether today. It's stupid. I know it and I won't do it. But some days it's easier to quiet that urge than others. Often the foremost though running through my head while working on this stuff is " Why am I doing this?!". It's a good question, ha. Just one of those days, I guess. Day three (or four? I think four) of this cheery old Bargue face. I wish there was a way to expedite this, but there really isn't :P No way out but through.  And please excuse my moodiness. I guess I should have worked in a run this morning.

This is the start of my new Bargue--Homer, I hear. I spent about the first 1.5 hours+ drawing the guidelines, then an hour and a half or so blocking in. And this was a couple hours into the next day. So a few hours in. It's just starting to set in how miserable this could end up being, ha :P  My drawing was feeling pretty stale last night. I didn't get a lot of sleep the night before, which I find can make a huge difference for me. I'm sad I got the stomach flu on the day I could have finished this one up. I kind of liked how it started. Sorry for the boring blog posts lately. Time is short these days. I could blame it on the holidays, but mostly it's just trying to divide my time between the important things and people in my life.

I don't know what to say about this... except that it's done! And a new one's up on the board. And I left this one sitting precariously on a chair in the studio (oops ;).

Sorry to bore you with progress shots. I know very well that the changes at this point are not very exciting. Working on this Bargue has been rather trying on my patience, and there's this part of me that feels like I will never ever finish it. I'm sure it's not true, but that's how it feels. I feel like I could continue making small adjustments on this thing forever and never get there. It's never going to be exactly alike. At what point to you say, "Good enough?" I know the point of call is much later than what I traditionally have done--just not sure where or how far away that is :P And here's my long figure pose. I might get one more day on this next week if I'm lucky (things are a little crazy next week). I've worked on this one for 30 hours so far. This extended drawing is a test of patience as well, and I'm trying so, so hard. That's all I can do, I guess. At any rate, I guess it's good that the weekend has come arou...

It seems like the camera upped the contrast on this photo, so... sorry about that. This was a 48-hour labor of love and hate and everything in-between. The first 46 hours were spent on the figure and the last two on the background and drapery, ha! In the end, I do feel a pretty significant sense of accomplishment--I've never pushed a drawing to this this level, and I learned a lot about value, subtlety, transitions, line, etc (oh, and also using charcoal :P). But there is still so much to learn and enormous room for improvement. That's an exciting and terrifying place to be. Yesterday was the last day of my scholarship at the atelier, and ohh I want to keep studying so bad. Sometimes I just feel like kicking myself for not starting this kind of thing when I was 18 or something. But hindsight's 20/20, and when I think about it, 1) I had little awareness that something like this existed or was within my reach.  And 2) I don't think I was ready for it anyway. I th...

Still just trudging along with this little Bargue here. Once I have the carved hair down pretty solid, I think I'll feel a bit better about it. It's getting closer, but the progress is oh-so-slow. Especially because it's been hard to get the time in on this thing this week. Babysitters are getting harder to come by, and I have a hard time working on this for more than 2-3 hours at a time. I did put some time in on it this morning, which was nice. I always like driving around on a Saturday or Sunday morning--it's so quiet, and the roads are so empty it almost feels like home ;) Here's the progress on my long pose portrait. I was feeling sort of paralyzed on this thing for quite a bit of the week. But yesterday I finally just shut my brain up and drew for a bit. I want to do things correctly and do them in the right order, but I'm going to have to find a way to strike a balance between following my intuition and following correct principles. If I get thin...

It seems to be about par for the course lately that I'm up in the middle of the night. There are a lot of thoughts swimming around in my head, so I thought I'd get at least some of them down (which might not be the best idea when it's 2AM, but oh well). Earlier this summer I won a scholarship for a month of full time study at a local atelier in the fall. I was pretty shocked that they selected me as the winner, since I really didn't feel like I had done much in the way of good work. But I was told that the decision was based largely on what they had seen of my dedication and stick-to-it-iveness (I had been coming around for evening drawing sessions for a while). I've been looking forward to this for months, and I started on Monday. Part of the day is spent working on a Bargue drawing copy (pictured above). The goal is to make an exact copy, virtually indistinguishable from the original (minus all the copier fuzz and all ;). I've worked on some co...