Started up with the paint today; just a re-do of the sketch with very diluted raw umber, then a background color. Monday we’ll start in with “dead coloring,” or thick layers of flat color.

Here’s a look at how the drawing was transferred. First, I traced the sketch with red pencil. Then I loosely traced it on the opposite side with charcoal. Finally, I laid the charcoal on the canvas itself and traced with a pencil to transfer the charcoal. Whew!

After another tedious day, I’m almost to the point where I can transfer the image to my canvas. The drawing is all light and shadows–no shades of grey–because that’s all that will be transferred, via tracing paper.

Well, here’s my first day sketching the model, using the tedious process I described previously. And believe me, it took till the end of the day to come up with anything remotely resembling her!

I feel I should mention that this is a horrible photo of her; she’s actually very pretty and young, and tired after posing for 6 hours!

And I have no idea how to paint curly hair. I guess the teacher will help me out.

This fascinating work of modern art, symbolic of the longstanding plight of dyslexic lepers in Kurdistan, is evidence of the artist’s burgeoning vulnerability…

Ah, I’m only fooling, it’s just me trying out oil paints for the first time. Stunning ain’t it? The teacher calls this “the fleshy ball.” It’s basically an opportunity to mix the right colors to paint caucasian skin, and, for newbies like me, an opportunity to get used to using a color palette.

Tomorrow, the models show up. We’ll have three days to draw them in the manner that we drew the busts, then next week it’s on to painting.

Painting is very messy, by the way. (Breaking news.) For this reason, I kind of doubt I’ll make it a hobby, but I think I will try to do digital paintings which involve starting with a limited palette of colors.

One day down. After a couple lectures about the oil painting process, we practiced by drawing a plaster bust. The models will arrive on Wednesday.

The method they’re teaching is very meticulous, essentially the same as the Bargue drawings I was doing a while back, but one thing that surprised me is that we’re doing all our drawing/painting about 8 feet away from the easel! What that means is the canvas is aligned with the subject. We step back and use a piece of string to measure and plot the location of various features. We walk up to the canvas, make a mark, walk back and check to see if the mark is in the right place.

The upshot of this tedious, non-creative process is that you end up with an image that’s a perfect copy of what you’re seeing, and if the canvas is aligned with the subject, the copy is also exactly the same size as the real thing. It’s kind of like a reverse-engineered photo. And if you get this part right, most of the hard work involved in getting a likeness is done.

So, we’ll have 3 days with the model to get this part done, plotting points and delineating highlights and shadows. Then next week, painting begins.