Stacy Weitz Minch

I can't really call this a real copy, because I did it so quickly and the drawing isn't spot on. But I was trying to capture that fresh, intentionality of brushstroke, and it's hard to get that if you get too finicky with the drawing. So I sacrificed the accuracy a little (of course, I did the best I could without pushing things around too much).

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.

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).

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. 

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.

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 ...

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 ;).

I have a couple little things I want to touch up, but I think I'm actually ready to quit working on this one this time. Not because I think it's a perfect copy, and not because I couldn't go on fixing little things about it for the rest of my life. But because I think there are some major things that could be fixed that would require almost an entire rework of the painting. And I don't think it's worth it. I'd rather start fresh with something new and let this one be what it is--a cooler (color temperature-wise) copy of an incandescent-lit photograph of a painting I've never seen in person ;) The nuance of expression isn't perfect and of course that drives me nuts, but considering my mistake-laden sketchy start (yikes), I think I did just about the best I could without working it to death. The color. I made a deliberate decision at one point to de-yellow the mix. And I've tried a couple times to warm it up after-the-fact because my teacher ...

I think I'm getting pretty close to saying "done" on this copy. I might make one more pass after this layer dries to soften some transitions and make a few temperature corrections and such. But that's a maybe. I don't know. I'm kind of ready to move on to something else, I think. This has been a really good learning experience. But again, I feel like painting is about 97% drawing. Especially when copying something like this. The drawing has to be pretty close, and that's what I've spent most my time on. But I've been working through some issues with the color on this one too. I was at a drawing session a few weeks back. This was taped up on my board and one of the artists mentioned how much more yellow my print was than the original (he had seen it in person), and that the skin tones in the original seemed to be very simple pinks (I've looked up a few images online, and the one I'm copying from seems much darker than some others too, b...

We have another wave of stomach flu going through our house--yikes! It's always lovely to wake up at 2AM to someone vomiting next to your face, ha! but such is life with little kids, and they're worth all the trouble :) However, I'm not very much looking forward to the (almost) inevitable illness--still crossing my fingers! I'm going to be taking a figure drawing class at a new place and they want us to draw with erasable colored pencils. They aren't something I've used before, so I decided to do a little copy with them so I could at least become vaguely familiar with how they work. They erase nicely, but the feel is pretty different from graphite. They're more waxy/smooth than pencil, so that may take some getting used to. It seems like they get dull faster than pencil too. So this is just a little experiment done while watching the same cartoon for the 17th time today ;) At least having sick babies gives me a good excuse to sit around with a d...

Well, it was a wild and crazy night here ringing in the new year with my brushes and paints, ha. I don't know about this copy. It's sort of atrocious in my eyes, but I'm going ahead and calling it quits here. I guess I'm glad I did it. It probably wasn't a waste of time. But I would like to have done it better. I expended so much effort trying to correct the drawing (which still isn't great) after that first go, that other aspects of the painting became sort of an afterthought. I'm sure I learned a few things in the process--always start with a good drawing! I should have spent more time really getting the drawing right in a simple way. But all that paint is just so distracting ;) Also, something very small here, but the whites of the eyes are much closer to flesh tone than white. And just spending some time mixing flesh tones and putting them up on canvas is helpful, even if I did a pretty crude job of it. I haven't painted much flesh up to this ...

It's been harder to find time to do projects at home lately, since I've been trying to spend a few hours at the atelier 4-5 times a week. I spend the mornings and early afternoons just trying to keep up around the house, and when I get home in the evenings, it's like everyone has missed me or something ;)  This is about a 3-hour copy of a Colleen Barry drawing I found on her blog. I just love the way she draws. It's really beautiful. And the play between her shapes is so sensitive and sophisticated. I'm not going to post a side-by-side because I'm using different materials and it's just not a very clear comparison (I toned my paper with watercolor, which is pretty different in hue than her paper, and she also seems to be using maybe a brown colored pencil? instead of graphite like I did here--if you're interested I'm sure you can find this image in a quick google search. she doesn't post many). But as I'm copying this drawing, I can ...

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 ;).

I think I mentioned I was trying out some new paper with this one. I don't know a lot about charcoal, but I do like the way this paper takes the medium. The only trouble is that it's really difficult to lift the charcoal once it's laid on the paper. Seems like the eraser just pushes the charcoal further into the paper fibers, leaving a smudgey looking gray. So that's not the best if you need to erase much. But that could be the soft willow charcoal I was using too... I don't know. Funny enough, working on this portrait was reminding me of working with watercolor--starting with the lights and leaving them on the paper, then slowly building up the darks. I did my best to get an accurate copy, but like I said, erasing was a little tricky with this stuff. So it feels a little off. But mostly I'm working on figuring out this charcoal stuff, so I'm fine with it. It's interesting how something can be really spot on as far as measurements go, but look l...

This was a quick hour-long copy sketch I did yesterday afternoon in prep for portrait class last night. I forgot to take a picture of my portrait start after class. And I'll probably start over next week anyway. I had gotten the portrait basically blocked in in the first 25 minutes, and then everyone decided to tilt the head in the second session. So I should have started over, but I didn't and it's no good to draw a tilted face on a straight head. Anyway, this copy is done after a contemporary artist, and she's really good. I like how all the shapes on the face connect. It's a little mysterious to me. I'm trying to adopt this kind of thinking, and maybe I need to only look at the model with half-closed eyes for the first little while because I see too much detail/variation in the value structure (I seem to be having that trouble with my roses too!). But something I'm noticing with good painting of any genre is that the darks connect, and the lights con...

7.5x9.5", oil on linen I'm sure I could fiddle around with this for quite a while longer, but for the sake of not overworking it, I think I'll end here. This has been a really fun copy to work on, and I hope I'll be able to transfer some of the things I learned here to my paintings from life. So much of painting is drawing, and it seems like that's where I often falter.  Here's a side-by-side, in case you're itching to see all the errors that I do ;) After watching this artist's instructional videos this weekend, I'm almost antsy to try another. But then again, maybe not. Maybe I'll try something from life (and prepare myself for an epic fail, as seems to be the case lately, ha).

"In a time of destruction, create something." -Maxine Hong Kingston I won't go into details here, but I was pretty distracted while working on this. Thankfully, it gave me something with which to occupy my hands on a difficult day. So while there's a lot I could pick apart about it, I'm not going to. The world seems a whole lot bigger right now than this drawing's imperfections. Here's the painting this study was used for--that shining armor, whew. Stunning. "Lamia" (first version) by Waterhouse

When I started this copy, I was pretty exhausted, and the next time I went to work on it, whew, there were a lot of errors that needed to be fixed (like, for instance, her right arm being about 1/4" too short, ha!). I probably should have just started over :P But I didn't, so I struggled through the mess. I think the darker gray paper was throwing me off a bit--I really haven't done much of the darker gray + white thing. The way all the different landmarks were tilted at different angles was pretty difficult too. I wanted to straighten everything more toward the vertical or horizontal. And the foreshortening of the legs--tricky.  I had a lot more trouble with this copy than I usually do, is what I'm trying to say. I almost quit halfway through, but decided to keep pushing. That deliberate persistence is really important if I'm going to get better at this stuff. I really believe that. And I hope I'm building my confidence for problem solving by pushing ...

11x7.5", pencil on paper I started this copy about a week ago and it's been going pretty slowly (just because it's so hard to find the time lately--when does school start again!?). I ended up staying up a little too late last night finishing it up because I was getting pretty sick of it hanging around. I definitely chose the wrong texture of paper for copying the original, and I have a feeling the original may have been a bit smaller than I made it here, just based on the lines and such. I was trying to do a little less measuring this time around. Which resulted in my oversizing everything like I do. Point being, this didn't end up being the most accurate copy. It's after Frank Dicksee's study for his painting "Chivalry." I always love seeing peoples' progress shots, so just in case this interests anyone, here are mine. And Dicksee's painting from this study down below :)   Photo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:...

This drawing has a much tighter line quality than the little Bargue studies I've been doing lately--such a beautiful body too :) Looking at what women wore back then, it's hard to believe such lovely shapes could have possibly resided under all that yardage of fabric, but I guess they did. And I printed out a couple copies of the reference drawing--one lighter, one darker, and tried to find a happy medium between the two. The images I found online had a lot of variation, so I did the best I could with what I had. I had to look up the story of Clytie since I was curious about this painting. Clytie, in Greek mythology, was a water nymph and lover of Helios, the sun. Helios dumped Clytie for someone else. Clytie tattled to the new lover's father about her affair with Helios, and the father had his daughter buried alive in the sand (since she had been 'ruined' by Helios). Clytie thought Helios would come back to her after his new lover was out of the picture, but ...