Marshall Jones week 2

Week 2 of Marshall Jones... I was so physically uncomfortable last week that I just brought my plein air gear last night instead of using the easels in the room. 

I realized this class is my first time in-person with oil paint and a live model since before covid, and also since my eye surgery.  I have realized that I accommodate my physical space a lot because of my eyes.... or I don't know, maybe the space was ok for everyone else or they didn't mind or whatever but I couldn't deal with it.  My palette was way too low and the back and forth from there to the painting was terrible.

Plein air to the rescue!

I felt I did a little better last night and it's a reminder that I still need so much practice.

It's overwhelming to be honest.

I keep having these thoughts that I'm not really very good even after all these years.

I've been doing so much graphite drawing lately, it's got me in a linear- thinking mode rather than a shape/mass thinking, and I need to rebalance that.

Marshall did some tweaky work on my painting which made it look a lot better, most of it was blending edges. He's a really, really good teacher.

I would not call this a finished painting but this is as far as I got.

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The lip structure and the highlight that looked very bright below...

Marshall took 2 sheets of white paper. and put them under the light  One he left flat, one he crumpled then uncrumpled. The un-crumpled paper is an overall darker value than the flat sheet of paper- compare to the forehead vs the intricate lip structure.

This was a super interesting way to describe and think about values in the face.

Marshall made my painting look a lot better, mostly by smoothing my edges.  He told me he used to do a lot of work painting celebrity portraits and most of what he did was smoothing shapes together rather than sticking value piles of paint, which was, in fact, exactly what I had been doing!

I showed him my Loomis/Asaro head app and he was very interested in it and wants to check it out further.

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In general my eyesight is a real pain in the ass with this stuff and all this time after surgery I'm still finding myself needing to figure it out and physically adjust and compensate to not having multi-focal vision. It sucks.