Studio Lighting for Poor People Who Aren't Allowed to Screw Anything Into the Ceiling.

With the time change this week, I realized that by 4 pm it was too dark to paint in my studio! It usually takes me until about noon to really get in the painting groove, so I was finally forced to make a trip to Home Depot last night and find a solution to my problem. Hurrah! All it took was a couple daylight bulbs, and a $20 shoplight. This was good, because I have chosen to keep painting instead of getting a "real" job, despite the fact that I may need to start eating Saltines for breakfast. 

When my husband came home from work, he said that our living room looked like a meth lab. "Except for all the paintings," he said helpfully.

Useful information: I found that by using a combination of "daylight" bulbs (blue light), and "soft white" (more yellow light), I could actually see the colors of my paint accurately. This is good, unless you are a fan of alarming realizations first thing in the morning. For example, that the gray sidewalk you thought you were painting last night is actually green. (This is a true story, from my more inexperienced days. [Yesterday.])

Bonus tip: It is also helpful to find a floor lamp across the street that your neighbor is throwing away.

Glen Orbik Head Drawing Class

My portrait drawing has taken a leap in the past few weeks, mostly as a result of Glen Orbik's head drawing class at 3Kicks Studio. Here's my drawing from tonight, done in about an hour and a half.

To illustrate just how much I've gotten out of these past few classes, check out my drawing from the first class:

Not too bad, just... boring. The major change, is that I've gone from just trying to make an accurate representation of what I'm seeing, to concentrating on making an accurate, but interesting picture. That's what Glen has been stressing--getting the big shapes in, and then going for a "cool design". If something's straight, make it more straight, if something's curvy, make it more curvy. It's put more of my attention on the fact our job as an artist is not to just copy what we're seeing. Though obviously being able to draw accurately is important, this is the next step.

Meanwhile I've learned some very useful things to understand the head better, which has made my portrait drawing much faster, and more accurate and convincing. The first homework he gave us was to use tracing paper over photographs and find and draw the planes of the head. You can print these same handouts from the website of Glen's teacher: http://www.fredfixler.com/index.php/cave-22/. I highly recommend this exercise--it really makes the planes of the head something you easily and naturally use. The exercises we've been doing from these diagrams have been a key part of what he stresses in finding the rhythms and modeling of the head.

Another thing that Glen has continually recommended is the importance of copying pictures of artists you like in order to learn from them. It really can't be stressed enough. Thought it's obviously up to you, he recommends John Singer Sargent, Andrew Loomis, Charles Gibson, and J.C. Leyendecker--the guy Norman Rockwell wanted to be when he started out.

In conclusion, I very highly recommend this class to anyone who already has their basic drawing skills and wants to be a great portrait artist.

I'm also taking another class, with the incredible Richard Morris. This class is pretty wildly different, and while I'm getting a lot out of it, it's also making my lack of anatomy knowledge painfully evident. Next up--anatomy classes!