Sunday, 11-Mar-18 19:36:23 CET

Emmanuelle 18 March 2018

It is Sunday 18 March 2018, it is cold and, I am on my way to a new live model painting session at de Stoker in Amsterdam.

Last week it did not feel like I was painting well. It is as if it was harder to come back from holidays. Both the aquarelle painting of Mona Lisa and then last Sundays painting of Ermelinde (?) was feeling below average. It can be like that. It is not possible to deliver top quality every week. I got a different feeling on the way to the model session this Sunday and this new feeling started with that I looked at old paintings of mine.

I had my oil paintings in huge stack on my desk in my home office. Between every painting I had matchsticks. Swedish matchsticks. When the stack of painting started to reach one and a half meter it was time to do something about this. Then when my mother in law wanted to see some of my latest work I designed a system for holding twelve paintings together. I made corner pieces that I print with my 3D printer. Every now and then I have printed a new set and moved paintings from the stack to a new set of panel-holder-corners. When doing this I looked at what I put into the panel-holder. Last week I was surprised that it looked so good already 2015.

With this feeling I went painting on the aquarelle club and I looked through my Pinterest collection of portraits that I made, and I decided to paint Julie Sandler. Frankly I have no idea whom it is but she had a nice smile and that was the only thing I needed that evening. I painted her and it went well. I even made a couple of mistakes here and there but overall it became a decent painting. Then I tweeted the painting to Julie and it turns out to be a sweet lady and she loved the painting. Now if the subject herself loves it whom am I to be overly critic about the painting. It is good that I can do it better so there is room for improvement  but good is good enough.

So with this feeling this cold but sunny day I travel to the painting session at de Stoker.

The model today was Emmanuelle. The artists today were Frank, Irene, Saskia, Tom and Denise.

Emmanuelle came from Italy. Frank had painted her at the Wakkers Academy last week so the model greeted Frank with recognition.

She was a thin model but with muscles and her face was with character so it was a challenging face. I decided for full figure.

I think it went well actually. There was a lot of measuring and measuring again. At some point I had the distances so that it worked out well. Nothing is more frustrating than having one part of the painting done with one measuring system and another done differently and not compatible with the first. For example the upper body measured with the height of the head and the lower body measured with the height of the lower leg but the lower leg is then not in proportion to the head.

I noticed though that if I cut of the top of the head on purpose, for the sake of layout, some other artists cannot easily judge the size of the head compared to the rest of the body. Even if I tell them that “the head ends here on” they have difficulties. When I do this I often get the comment that the head is to big but it is not so. At least not so that I have checked again and again, again.

When I came home, I gave my brushes an extra cleaning witch Zest-It and soap with water. Afterward I wrap the brushes in a paper that when it dries, it shrinks and that brings the hairs together.