Stacy Weitz Minch

I intended to go a little bigger with this portrait than I've been doing lately (mostly I've been painting 3-hour portraits on 8x10's), so I gave myself plenty of space and ended up going a lot bigger, ha (can't quite seem to not fill the available space--I have this taped to a 16x20" board ;). This model had such fair, subtle skin tones, they were really difficult to translate. It seemed like every color I mixed was overstated in one direction--if I saturated the paint enough, the value was too dark, but if I made the value correct, the tone was too cool/chalky. I don't know what the answer is (probably should have at least pulled out the lead white), but I like getting a little painting practice from life in here and there. I was using a limited palette of titanium white, cadmium red, ivory black, yellow ochre, and raw umber. And I'm thinking I should pull the raw umber out (or use a warmer or less green/purple leaning brown). Also probably wasn...

I started this small portrait sketch from life. It was a 2-hour session, and I didn't get very far. So I took a reference photo, and I did a little more work on it last night. Working from a photo is a little different, and I was working under a clip light in the dark while we watched a movie, so it's a little rough. But the drawing is slightly better. I'll probably give it one more pass when it dries.

10x8", oil on linen mounted to hardboard I've been trying to start doing more painting from life. I've painted a lot of fruit from life, but a portrait is a little bit different. Accuracy in drawing is the main difference. Nobody will know if that strawberry is a millimeter too large, but in capturing a likeness, a millimeter can be crucial.  This particular model (Micah Christensen) is an art historian, and he spent the majority of the three hour session relating interesting stories and info for a very attentive crowd of artists (also, it was a much larger group at this session than usual, which I would guess can be attributed to the popularity of the model, though I was completely oblivious before showing up, ha ;). Anyway, I wasn't completely satisfied with the drawing, but this was a fun session :)

This is a five-day portrait I did in a workshop with Scott Waddell last week. He's a really good teacher, but it was a huge class (19 people), which made it hard for him to get around and critique, so the week kind of felt like floundering through a new approach. Scott paints with a window shading technique, where he basically finishes one form at at time. It was a foreign way of working for me, but I enjoyed trying something new. I think I prefer a little more context to go on when I'm painting (like, for instance, I started painting the forehead/cheek area, but once I added the dark behind the ear all of my flesh tones suddenly felt too light). These are things I'm sure you would get used to and have a feel for in time. Anyway, progress shots below.

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 ;).