i-Browse Coffee House

An embarrassing amount of hours was spent on this schematic. This is i-Browse in Alhambra, a coffee house I haunt at night and on the weekends because I get too easily distracted at home to get any work done. Gallery Nucleus used to be across the street.

As I was drawing the line art with graphite, people kept tossing me weird looks because I kept scanning the room, trying to gauge relative distances of pillars and tables. I must've looked pretty funny.

Brianna

Three hours. I switched to painting on smaller 14" x 18" panels so I could get more work done with the time we're allotted for class. I found it actually more difficult because the size of the brushstrokes got relatively bigger as I scaled the canvas size down. I guess that's a good thing since I have a tendency to noodle on tiny details instead of keeping in mind the overall big picture.

I'm pretty happy with the way this one turned out.

Karol

Five hours. Karol's sporting a Josephine Baker-inspired get-up. Even with the added time, I still couldn't finish this painting. The drawing's off too. Sheesh.

Value Studies

One hour each. For my Sketching for Environment class, we were asked to do value studies of landscapes with organic elements in them. These were done at the L.A. Arboretum this past Friday on my day off.

After J.C. Leyendecker

Three hours.

Rajiv

Three hours. I am gradually getting better, faster, and more confident. I had a blast with this one tonight. Rajiv is a terrific model and has fantastic features to paint.

By the way, if any of you were curious, the palette I am using is a "mud" palette that was popularized by Michael Hussar (Sean Cheetham's teacher). He has some really wicked paintings up on his site; check it out when you get the chance.

After J.C. Leyendecker

Three hour master copy after a detail of J.C. Leyendecker's Vacation. I've been struggling with indicating features and volumes efficiently and effectively, so I've decided to copy works from the masters to get a better sense of how to solve these problems. Duplicating other artists' works is the next best thing to drawing from life, because you can absorb their solutions to similar drawing conundrums, thereby adding their strategies to your repertoire.

Jee and Eric

Ten-minute figure drawings of Jee, and five-minute quick sketches of Eric's head. These two are close friends.

Stacy

Four-and-a-half hours. A little experimenting with Zhaoming Wu's style of pushing and pulling charcoal.

Nicole

Twos, fives, and twenty-fives. Trying out a variety of charcoal techniques inspired by Henry Yan's processes. Something a little different from the norm.

Keith

Five-minute studies focusing on delineating the basic structures of the torso and pelvis.

Jonathan

Sloppy two-minute quick sketches and a decent one-hour pose. Jonathan is always fun to draw because of his epic beard. Glenn likens him to Zeus. I agree!

Liz

Three hours. I need to find an uninstructed long pose session that works with my schedule, so I can practice more of these and actually finish one!

Marisa

One-and-a-half hours.

Petra

Five minute quick sketches, and longer studies of twenty-five and forty-five minutes a piece. I'm trying to be more bold with my mark-making; sometimes a daring stroke, even if inaccurate, can appear right to the viewer based on how well it conveys confidence. Even though I see mistakes here and there, it felt good to move through my drawings at an accelerated pace, achieved by placing marks in quick succession.

Lynda

Two to twenty-five minutes. The quick sketch and figure drawing classes being taught by Kirk Shinmoto and Glen Orbik are really helping.

Lilly

Five minutes each. We concentrated on the simplified volumes of the torso tonight. Also, it's kind of embarrassing to mention this, but I think I finally learned how to hold the pencil correctly tonight, after only two years of doing figure drawings every week. Haha.

Angela

Three hours. Her skin tone seems awfully orange, especially against such a cool grey background. I knew I should have neutralized it more. Oh well, another painting, another lesson learned!