Morgan Complete

I ended up painting right through to the last minute of the last session. whew! Nine sessions, three hour segments, once a week, and because I worked with a group of artists it only ended up costing me about fifteen dollars a session. I would love to keep this going and just continue to do eight week sessions but the artists that I work with are not classical realists and they found it difficult to keep their interest over the long period of time. I worked on a 9"x12" inch canvas because 27 hours is barely enough time to do a detailed figure painting. 50 hours would be more to my liking. I'll be taking figure or portrait painting at GCA this fall so that will keep the ball rolling. One of the artists in my group was asking me if I found it difficult to transition from still life painting to figure painting. She's a landscape painter and she was having a lot of trouble switching gears. I told her that what I do is try to keep the process as uniform as possible so that whatever small gains I get from a painting can be repeated and built on in the next one. If you re=invent the wheel for each new painting it's hard to chart your progress. For instance on this one my progress was mostly in the area of conceptualizing the light and getting the right chroma for the skin tones. The models skin tones were a lot less chromatic then I envisioned them in my first pass. I had the spotlight almost directly over her head and slightly behind her. Once I started to ask myself what that light should look like on each part of the form I was able to get the overall light structure to look more unified. My problem area was and is painting the shadow side of the face. I din't want to just leave it an undistiguishable mass without in some way indicating the position of the eye. A lot of squinting and re-painting and I'm still not satisfied. This will be my starting point for the next one. Get this right before moving on.