Stacy Weitz Minch

I kept wondering why I was feeling so far behind on this drawing. Then yesterday after the pose ended I started counting up all the hours I was actually present for the pose, and realized it was less than half, 23 of the 48 hours. It's hard not to compare my work to the students who have been there for most of those 48 hours, but it's really not a fair comparison (and I've realized I'm not much of a fan of comparisons during critiques either--case in point, the portrait below that I hastily wiped out following one such critique. Not saying I mind someone pointing out good points in others' drawings, just the direct comparison can be a little painful). The portrait I wiped out was probably a little better imho (which makes sense, since I spent a LOT longer on it--even though I attempted to make suggested corrections in my second attempt, mostly lifting the eyes a bit), but that's a moot point now. What I like about this drawing is that it feels like a so...

  I made it in for about an hour and a half of this session yesterday. Still working on trying to get this thing to look a little less messy, and to get the rounding of the forms in place. Also spent 20 minutes or so trying to lay the portrait in again. At least she has a face now. At this point, I don't really care all that much about getting the likeness. I'm going to try to attack the finishing aspects of the figure as the first priority in the little time I have left.

I have so much negative emotion attached to this drawing right now. I'd really like to tear it off the board and rip it to shreds. I know that's a very dramatic sounding statement and all, but I'd be lying if I said anything less. Seems like I've worked on the portrait almost exclusively this week and it feels like it was all a big fat waste of time and effort, which is frustrating because of the effort it takes to just be able to show up. I was trying to move things around, but it was off in so many places I thought it better just to wipe it out--I think I had the entire tilt of the face off. I don't think I can recover with this drawing. I just don't care. I'm also losing two days a week of babysitting (free babysitting because I had worked out a trade with a neighbor). I don't know that I'll be able to replace that for that for a while (maybe after May when the teenagers in the neighborhood are out of school). I guess what I'...

This drawing feels like a complete disaster. I don't know what's happening, but I feel like I'm losing whatever natural inclination for drawing I ever had. I think if I had walked in on the first day I showed up here and just followed my own intuition, I would have come up with something more honest, more sincere, and likely more interesting than what I have here.  I'm going to keep trying to rally. I will. I just feel like I'm drowning in a sea of information and I'm having a hard time finding something solid to hold onto. It's not that I don't want to be hearing the information. It has all helped me tremendously and I'm doing the best I can to integrate it all, but I just need to somehow find my center again. When I was in 10th grade we read Lord of the Flies, which is just a disgusting book. I really hated it. We had to write a book report and I think we submitted our topic/argument before the paper. My teacher was skeptical about my thesis becaus...

  Another quick study of this rose I have hanging around my kitchen, this time in watercolor and watercolor pencil.   And the second session on this long pose. It's feeling super scary right now. And maybe the head, or at least the face, is too big. I started bringing down the values but didn't get all that far...

  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.

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 ;)

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 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 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 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...

  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'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...

  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.

15 hours down, 5 to go--I'm working as quickly as I can. Spent the first hour or so yesterday working the portrait, then started keying down the values. In the next few hours I'll try to tie the values together, refine my charcoal marks and bring more dimension to the drawing. But I don't have a lot of time, so...

  I'm about 12 hours into this one now, with 8 to go next week (that is, if life goes according to plan...). Since there's not much time left, I think I'll really try to hone in on the portrait during one session (which I was just starting to do) and go from there.  The feet are looking too big to me. And it's just hard to keep these long poses from feeling stuffy and awkward. I get frustrated with myself sometimes because I feel like I lose the unity of the drawing along the way. It looks like I worked a little here and there, etc--some of the value structure is feeling pretty spotty. I just want it all to fit comfortably together, and it's hard to maintain that unity. I really haven't had much time on this one, so it's fine. But I'm hoping I can manage a little more time in the model room with the next pose.

Sorry if these posts are boring--I find it helpful to organize my thoughts, in writing, about the drawing as it progresses. I've had very little time to work on this drawing (7 of the 27 hours so far, ha!), and yet I feel like it's a completely different drawing every time I work on it. I'm almost pretty sure it's only getting worse. I'm in the process of inching the legs left, so please ignore them. The shapes are really weird at this point, and I need to thin them out (I always tend toward too wide at first). The pit of the neck and the heel weren't matching up quite right, and now the placement is better, but I feel like moving that leg changed the rhythm of the hip area pretty significantly, and I want to bring a little more movement back into that area because now it's feeling awkwardly stiff. Hoping it's one of those "it'll get worse before it gets better" things? :P On the positive side, I actually got a full 3 hour session in ye...

I was in Arizona all last week. It's a great place to visit when it's snowing buckets at home.  But I've missed being at the atelier during the day (enough passenger seat torso sketching already! ha). So when we pulled into the garage yesterday, I turned right around and was immediately out the door, ready to catch the last half of the model session before the weekend. When I got there, the umbrella light had been placed so that it was directly blocking the entire head from my view. Once we got that sorted out, I realized the portrait had been turned to the right, and there had been some subtle shifts in the way the model had settled into the pose (and maybe even some slight movement of the stand?). Which left me thinking, "Hm, this drawing doesn't look much like the model in front of me." But I suppose that's to be expected when you miss a whole week--you miss making those subtle changes as they occur and it all adds up to a pretty different pict...

Ha, in the first two weeks of this pose I've spent a total of 2.5 hours on this poor drawing! I'm going to have to play some serious catch-up in the next two weeks.

I only had about 30 minutes on this long pose start after setting up, so it's not much. I had the very last pick of spots since babysitting hasn't been an option with the kids being sick--I wasn't able to be there for the start of the session. So after spending 40 minutes in rush hour traffic (it usually takes me less than 15), I got there about 45 minutes before the end, and was lucky there was any space left at all! :P I'm really fine with this view though. It feels like I'm always on the other side of the room, so I don't mind this angle in the full lighting from the front. It's different. Also, from this weekend at the studio. The icicles in the back room are pretty impressive (though I hear they were knocked down yesterday).