figure study

a preparatory sketch for a figure painting we are doing in class:

late summer on the lieutenant river

This a landscape I just finished that I had been working on whenever possible for the last month:



I started it with a pencil line drawing:

portrait commission

This is a small portrait commssion I painted about two years ago as a gift. The setting is South America:

man with a fish

This is a large commissioned painting from a few years ago. I was looking at alot of the 20th century Russian painting, with the large brush strokes and stark realism.

baby jack

a sketch from a few days ago, sleeping in his car seat:

pelvis study

I have always found the pelvis one of the most difficult shapes to draw and I always admire artists who can draw it out of their head in any position. As Robert Beverly Hale said, "all lines run over conceived form"-meaning without a thorough understanding of the shape, one cannot draw it. With this in mind, I set up a pelvis for my class to draw, with particular emphasis on understanding of the planes that make up each half (called os innominatum, "the bone with no name", which actually looks like a propeller blade). This is my page of demos:

class progression

This are some examples of the projects we might do in the first few classes in my private sessions at LAA.
1. Starting with copying from plates; in this case eyes from the Bargue Book. The goal is to accurately identify angles.



2. Blocking out the contour. The idea is to transfer the lesson above to sketching a cast from life, leaving out the inner shapes:



3. Then, developing more of the inner shapes, and blocking out the basic shadow shapes: