Next to last class

I knew the great night of sleep I got on Sunday night would come back to haunt me. I didn't fall asleep last night until around 6:30 in the morning. I did manage to drag myself out of bed around 9 and get to my art class. I thought it was going to be the last class and since I missed last week's class, I was worried about time constraints. Turns out that the model was out also and they had someone else so I actually didn't miss anything. And it turns out we're going to get one more week to make up for it which works out even better.

I tried to work on the painting from a picture I had taken with my phone but the camera on my phone isn't all that great so the picture was useless for any fine detail. It was good enough to block in some of the values, get a decent approximation of the skin tone and correct some drawing errors. I should have taken a picture of that stage but I completely forgot.

It all worked out so much better when I got back in front of the live model. The studio had the air turned up a little too high and she was cold so this time she put her sweater around her arms and it looked really nice so I decided to include it. I'm also happy that this painting is starting to move away from looking like a police sketch drawing and beginning to look like an actual individual. In the past my portraits tend to get stuck in that generic sort of stage. Yes they look like a human. Yes you can tell if it's male or female. But it looks like a person you saw out of the corner of your eye. It has no characteristics of the individual. I really need to get my teacher's advice on how to get farther away from that police sketch stage.

There is still a lot of fine tuning to do. I hope the pictures I got come out okay because this is not something that I'll be satisfied with after only one more session with the model. There are just too many little things all over the place that need to be adjusted.