Doing the Tishes

In preparation for the alla prima workshop I will be attending, I am starting a series of poster studies and master copies. A bit of perfect timing - the plaster copies of David's eye, nose, mouth, and ear arrived a couple days ago, and I picked those up (and some wonderful small Princeton rounds) and will be drawing and painting those as practice, too.

Here's the underpainting of the first copy:
















Luckily, I have another shot at fixing all the places I screwed up: the overly-wide right cheek, the globella area, the lips, the nose, the direction of beard in the right-hand bottom corner.

Nevertheless, I think it's a fair shake for an hour's work. Especially since I kept screwing up the nose, which I thought was going to be "so easy." I was quite pleased with how the composition worked out, too: I had originally planned just to paint the nose and a bit of flesh surrounding it. But the more I crammed in, the more I liked it, until I had a closely-cropped Portrait going on.

The Young Man as a Portrait Artist

Good news: I was accepted into Studio Escalier's 2011 alla prima portrait workshop!

In advance of that, I've been busy burning hours working on elements of portraiture: drawing ears, eyes, noses, and mouths, and learning the related anatomy. I know what the sclera is. I can identify the scaphoid fossa. I've learned about the infrapalpebral furrow. The helix, tragus, and their antagonists (the anti-helix and anti-tragus) are like dear, close friends by now. I'm just not sure what in heck the caruncula is. (And the girl at Starbuck's, who coincidentally was studying the anatomy of the eye, didn't know either, and left pretty quickly after I asked.)

(Well, OK...it's a chunk of meat in the 'lacrimal lake'....but what's it do?)

I've been copying some anatomical parts from Tony Ryder's wonderful book on figure drawing - perhaps the best figure drawing book I know of. Also have at hand Stephen Rogers Peck's Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist, which has decent anatomical information but rather weirdy, plasticky-looking paintings (I guess) of the anatomical parts (not to mention extremely old-fashioned photos). Also have some photos, a number of Titian's paintings that my work was kind enough to dontae colour copies of. I plan to draw from these as much as possible (I have Peck at work to draw over lunch hours), and then to work my way up to doing copies of the Titians. I want to start doing some portrait poster studies, and then move on to doing finished paintings of, say, a nose, an ear, a caruncularly-complete eye.