Painting Problems

It's parent observation week for the LaGuardia Dance department! 

The LAST ONE for me, I'm so sad!

Although......... maybe they will let me come to paint???

They totally would if I asked, they are very friendly to it.

I like painting dance classes for many reasons-but it sure is a lot of problems to solve.

It's exactly like expenses: one goes away and three more appear.

It's such a difficult environment because of the time and also there is no composition. In that way it is more difficult than plein air.

So today I got to watch one class, so I had an hour and half.

I know how to budget the time now.

The first half of the class is barre.  That's the time I have to paint the room.

Then the barres go away and it's time for floorwork.

That's when I have to get a pose in my sketchbook while the dancers are doing combinations and decide on the figure arrangement.

I am at a point where I need to learn the ballet positions. It would make this part of the process about 70% easier. So that's my next step, and I hope I get to do this again...... I hope this isn't my last week of dance class painting....

5x7 gouache and pastel

I gray-toned an illustration board and gave it a coat of clear gesso, for the pastel.

Once I started laying in the pastel, I switched back to gouache., mostly.  The painting is about 80% gouache.

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I have a kind-of onging problem, difficulty if you will, and today I realized it has to do with scale.

In all my dance class paintings, the room itself is about the same size. I pick a section that I think has good floor-to-wall proportion. It also greatly depends on where I am sitting.

But the size of the figures relative to the room- from my vantage point are quite large.  This is a difficulty when placing several figures in nice size to the page together. In the picture above, look at how large Daya is compared to the room, because she is close. At viewpoint size in my painting, her feet would be near the bottom of the page and her head almost to the top.

Today I shrunk them a little.

I think it kind of works because it pretends I am sitting farther back than I actually am.

But I have to guess the height of the dancers relative to the room.

This is something I need to play around with and is a point of deviation from reality.

I think as long as I am conscious of the eye-level perspective I can work it out, at least in a good-enough way.

Tomorrow and Thursday I am going back and I'll try something slightly more zoomed out AND even smaller figures as if I was farther back.  It's a real composition challenge that has been bothering me for a while now.