Workshop WIP

I'm taking a workshop this month (4 Thursdays) with Robert Maniscalco. He's an SOG member but doesn't participate on the boards. I'm hoping that some intensive coaching will help me turn a corner.

Robert is a great teacher - pretty much ran through the first year of art school in about 3 hours (what a time saver!). He's fun to listen to and energetic. He's also the kind of teacher who'll come up, grab your brush, and start scrubbing in Prussian blue because... well, actually I don't know why he did that! I like that kind of interaction, but a few of the others are skittish about it.

This is Rick's underpainting, 20" x 16". He has a moustache, hence the weird upper lip, and the smudges in the lower left are my 2 year old's contribution. I'll post the completed work on Friday.

[Kimberly Dow]

Lisa,

I'm looking forward to seeing the finished piece - looks great so far.

Have fun, Im jealous. I'm wanting to attend workshops badly.

[Chris Saper]

Although I have never seen Robert paint in person, I have seen his video tape, which is excellent and very well articulated - I am sure this is the kind of teacher he is. Good luck!

[Steven Sweeney]

I'll second the comments about the video, which can be reviewed and ordered here. If you don't want to get up and start painting after watching it, you couldn't have been paying attention.

Well, class was cancelled today, so I will post this next week.

I talked to Robert today, and told him that Chris Saper and Steven Sweeney enjoyed his video, and he was really happy about that! He said you've made his day.

The workshop resumed on Tuesday, where we built the Power Palette, and I proceded to paint this utter dog.

A few posts are coming herein.

That last one actually looks much worse in person. So, I took the rest of my Power Palette and fooled around with it to see if I could make something that looked a little less weird.

Here is the practice run. I don't know what happened to that last attachment.

Yes, I do realize it looks like Michael Caine in drag, but I was just noodling around.

This last Thursday we had Marcella, who was an excellent model despite my hamfisted rendering.

Perhaps I should have posted this to the workshops forum? If the moderator would like to move it that would be fine.

This is the palette we mixed. It is a great way for me to get my value scale under control, a nice shortcut because it's numerical. It's a little confusing because I kept thinking I should give every color combination a whack.

I've learned a bunch of things and experimented with colors I don't normally use. I'm not crazy about the bottom row - these are the basic "flesh" tones and are made cooler, redder, or yellower by adding varying amounts of the other tones in the same column. Nice and simple! But I think I'll be changing the composition of the basic flesh to something I find more appealing, just personal taste I suppose.

We have one more workshop next week, and I hope to get a little more finesse before our time is up.