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.