Sunday, 23-Oct-16 21:44:30 CEST

2016-10-23 Maud

It is Sunday 23 of October 2016 and I am on my way to a live model painting session in Amsterdam. This is the second and final session with Maud. Last week I made a painting that I consider finished so this week I will attempt in making a painting from scratch again.

One thing that was new last week was that I managed to avoid using white. I tried doing this a couple of times but it did not feel good. Last Sunday I had a big blob of white on the palette that I did not touch during the entire session and afterwards I disposed it.

I got the impression that the use of no white made the colors more vibrant. On the other hand, the white makes things smudgy and without white it becomes a little more stripy. This Sunday I will try again painting without any white but this time I will try using a bit of medium.

Today the weather is sunny. It is a beautiful day today. The intercity train is on time and I can sit in a single seat with a little table just perfect for blogging on the way to Amsterdam.

On the way home I could not get a blog seat so to speak. Instead I had a stop-train and behind me I had a little kid that enjoyed swinging her legs and constantly kick the back of my seat. The mother did not interfere. So, I had to do that instead.

Somehow the painting session went by quick. I used a long time for drawing to get things right but I think it is worth it. Nothing it worse than finishing the painting and realizing that the hand is way to small and place too far away. Usually it is the hands giving problems. These first two sessions I used a little bit more time to verify that what I had been drawing was indeed correct. It is funny though to see how two different regions of the same drawing can have their own “logic”. I noticed that usually the head region is fine on itself and then the region where the hands are being also fine on itself but then for example these two regions are too far apart. I found out that when using different measuring lengths then this can be avoided. For example, measuring everything per the distance from the top of the head to under the chin – that can be one measuring unit. Another can be top of head and a nipple. That is a longer distance. So, with these two units I triangulate the model and verify that my drawing has the same triangle distances.

There many times so that when measuring in one way everything is fine. Then when switching to another measuring unit I cannot believe that I could be so completely off. Now then I think about it perhaps it is easier to start with a bigger measuring unit and then in the next phase use and smaller unit. I will try that the next time.

Then after drawing I started painting and I used the same idea of trying to use as little or no white. For a long time, I could work like so but I started to run out of time so I had to finish off things and at that point I decided to bring back in the white paint. At this point I used it only for highlights. The white paint was not everywhere. I think this is also how Mr Carder suggests that you should go about with the white paint. Except for that feeling I was running out of time it was a great painting session. Next week the models name is Suzanne. I hope it is a nice model.