Drawing from Life -

We had 'long pose' week at Arts Umbrella's figure drawing this last week. Michelle was great fun to watch (of course) - as she did mini-oil-paintings on tiny pieces of Masonite:

She took down her tiny vertical palette of neutral paints (so cool) before I could get a picture, but here are her cute paintings.

And *today* at Arts Umbrella, I began a three day Figure Drawing workshop with Ned Mueller.

The model didn't show up today (much to Ned's consternation), so we ended up going over portraiture instead. A very nice review of basic principles -

-and it was great to watch Ned demonstrate his lovely approach to drawing heads. You can see what I ended up doing today after watching him over on my blog.

Giving oils another try...

After investing in yet more art supplies, a set of Pan Pastels, I was still not getting everything I wanted from the materials. In frustration I got out my oils and began painting over a failed pastel painting. To my surprise I found that the acrylic pastel ground had a very nice tooth to paint on AND my pastels worked on it too! This gives me a comfortable mix of drawing and painting...now I need to experiment on painting in very thin layers so the paintings dry quickly.

This is from a long pose figure session, oil on the pastel ground with charcoal pencil.