The night before my birthday this image came out as I sat doodling in bed. (It’s my favorite time to just draw without worrying about results. I sleep better—if I sleep at all—after a visual brain-dump of how I’m feeling at the end of the day.)
You may already know that after a certain age birthdays still hold joy, but also anxiety and trepidation. I’m getting older, that’s all there is to it, and with age comes a kind of panic that I haven’t done all that I have meant to do. There’s a hopelessness that I never will accomplish what I set out to do. And a heart-wrenching sadness that in our youth-obsessed culture, my age can and will be used against me.
But dammit, I’m still on the wheel, working harder at turning it than when I was young. And in many, if not most respects, I’m doing a better job at the half-century mark than I ever did when I was young.
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Dance party where the brilliant Lisa Ornstein played fiddle and led the band. This photo was taken at ISO 1600, f3.5, 1/10th of a second. Then I fussed over it in photoshop for awhile.
Life has been a whirl, consumed by daily tasks that impinge my art practice. It’s been a long while since I’ve posted.
It’s not that I haven’t been lifting pencil and brush. I have been, but most of what I’ve created is not for public consumption.
I’ve been incubating. I’ve also been learning a few new skills. I’m taking a beginning photography class and finally learning to use my fancy camera after owning it for 2 years. At the same time I took a landscape painting class. Yes, more classes. I know I said I wasn’t going to take any classes for a while, but then a while passed. And when these two classes presented themselves I couldn’t refuse.
The photography class has been fun, and now I know where the on/off button is located, and why it has three clicks. And instead of putting the camera on automatic, I make choices about the geometry all the little dials form. Getting the little orbiting concepts of ISO, f-stop, and shutter speed aligned well enough to create a perfect crystalline photo is darn hard. I still don’t understand white balance, but I know these things take time.
It’s a good thing I don’t have a television.
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Red-haired Girl (cropped) Watercolor 300# Arches hot press Copyright 2012 by Margaret Sloan
Model guild benefits are wonderful opportunities for painting. There are often two sections: short poses and long poses. I like to spend the morning at the short pose session, warming up with gesture drawings. After a quick lunch, I get down to brass tacks for a single long pose. After racing through the brittle morning time of 1-, 2-, and 5-minute poses, I can relax into the long 3-hour pose, and the afternoon unravels and stretches like a rubber band. My mind settles solidly into the work.
It may feel luxurious to have 3 full hours with the same pose, but the model’s timer is still ticking, so I like to organize my process. For this 3-hour pose, I allowed myself 40-minutes (2 20-minute periods) to make a graphite drawing, then I started painting. I try to get an accurate drawing quickly, as poses shift slightly over time, and even the best, most rock-solid models have to take a breath now and then. And once you start painting with watercolor, you can’t make a lot of easy changes.
There is really nothing like painting from life. You are able to see infinite numbers of color that could never show up in a photograph. The blue-green in the shadows around the eyes, the mineral violet in the shadows. You can see the subtle shifting of values, the way the skin flows over muscle and bone.
I’m not against painting from (your own) photos. In the interest of time and money, I often use digital references. But there is nothing like painting the portrait of a live person. Here’s to life.
L’chaim!
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After reading Sue Smith’s blog at Ancient Artists about pushing your art to the next level, I felt I needed to challenge myself. So, watercolor backpack in hand, and a stack of failed paintings (the backs of the paper still pristine, ready for work) under my arm, I headed to a local life drawing session to try my hand at sketching with water and paint.
I was in a kerfuffle from the first moments, adrift without the guiding compass of charcoal pencils and kneaded eraser. And painting at the session was completely different from painting at home. Normally I stand at my easel and work on a vertical surface; at the session, I sat at a table, paper propped on my backpack.
1-minute watercolor war zone
Right away, my body rebelled against sitting. My neck and back ached, my hands stung, and my butt fell into a pins-and-needle coma. The process of painting like that was awful.
I floundered during the first 20-minute set of 1-minute poses, completely rudderless and out of control. I thrashed about with brush, paper, paint, water, making a mess.
The quick gesture paintings looked like a war zone. Body parts were disconnected. Chaotic limbs and runny torsos bled across the page. The figures turned into misshapen blobs of color.
During the break in poses, I screwed up my courage and asked if it would bother anyone if I stood. Talking to people! Asking for something! That was a breakthrough in itself, overcoming my little mouse-self that doesn’t like to make a fuss in public.
You know what? Nobody cared. So I stood.
That helped. The next set of 2-minute poses made me much happier. I began to make friends again with my paintbrush, and like any good friend, my trusty Kolinsky sable helped me to see in a new way. It taught me to look for the large shapes, forms, and shadow patterns.
2-minute watercolor sketches
The 5-minute poses came along a bit better . The one below is my favorite. The horns on her helmet-hair were accidental, but I love them. Watercolor warrior woman!
5-minute watercolor sketch
At 10-minutes I thought that I could give myself a few graphite guidelines to help me control where I put the paint. And that is where I lost the energy of the previous paintings.
10-minute watercolor sketch
Below you can see the final 20-minute pose. Except for the extraordinarily long arm, it’s a pretty correct representation of the model’s position. But that’s about it. It has lost some of the wonderful freedom of the quick sketches.
20-minute watercolor sketch
Somewhere between loss of control and total control there are pictures to be made. The challenge is to navigate to that tricky space.
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A few years ago I studied briefly with a life-drawing teacher who made me stand arm length from the paper, take up a hand-size piece of charcoal, and dance while I drew.
“Keep your arm straight, he directed. “Draw from the shoulder, not the wrist. Move your body!”
He turned on some jazzy music, and insisted that I dance throughout the whole 20-minute set of short poses.
“You already know how to find proportions,” the teacher said. “You know how to draw the parts of the body. You’ve got a good eye. Now you have to find some life, some joy in your drawings.”
You must understand. I’m not a cheeky, dancing-on-the-table party-girl kind of person; I’m a focused, earnest, git-r-done kind of person. Generally, I don’t dance; I plod.
And I was deadly serious about learning to draw. I had been studying with Rob Anderson for a couple of years, and was used to doing slow, careful, accurate work. I was strict with myself.
Doing a dance step and shaking my hips while trying to capture on paper the motion of a model? It was a little weird. Okay, so it was a lot weird. And I was afraid I’d let go of the drafting skills I’d worked so hard to gain. I was afraid the outcome would be terrible.
But you know what? The dancing didn’t destroy my hard-won knowledge of proportions, comparative drawing, and anatomy. All the practice I’d done previously was lodged in my subconscious, and when the music started and I started moving, the knowledge and skill bubbled up and gave form to my dancing.
I wasn’t just head banging in a papery mosh pit; I was floating around gracefully on a dance floor sprung with newsprint and chalk. And the drawings were something entirely different from anything I’d done before.
All that dancing had helped set me free from precious scratchy little marks and awkward figures. Those dance-infused drawings marked a huge leap of progress for me.
I normally work in a silent studio, but these days, when my drawings start to seize up into crabbed little wads of chalk-snot, I put on my headphones, spin my Ipod dial to music, and do a little shimmy at the easel.
Last month I spent a brilliant morning drawing at a model guild benefit, and it reignited my love of life drawing, and especially the gesture. And since I get an disproportionate number of hits for “gesture drawing,” I thought I’d scratch out some thoughts on gesture drawing from life.
Gesture drawing is often described as capturing the action of a pose, the feeling of a thing, the “inner essence”. It’s quick, it’s forceful, it’s to-the-point. It captures an active moment in time. A frozen glimpse of a model balancing on one leg; a dog loping along the beach; a bank of clouds blowing like boulders across the horizon.
At it’s most academic, gesture drawing is about studying. It’s about drawing—a lot of—poses, or people, or animals, or landscapes, in a short amount of time. It’s a rapid and deep immersion into a multiplicity of form and line. It’s an exploration of media and mind. A flick of the wrist and the arc of the arm discover new shapes and spaces, new angles and elements, new ideas to build upon later when drawing time has once again slowed to a careful crawl.
But at it’s most basic level, gesture drawing is simply and awfully darn fun.
4 1-minute gesture drawings
Charcoal on newsprint
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Kate Watercolor 23″ X 19″ 300# Arches hot press
Copyright 2012 by Margaret Sloan
When I painted this picture, I remembered that Mary Whyte, in a workshop, told us to name our paintings before we made our first washes of color. I couldn’t for the life of me remember this girl’s name (the daughter of a cousin-in-law, she’s a delightful girl, but I only met her once), so I just called her princess. I don’t mean princess in a bad way—all diva and finer-than-thou—but princess in a good way, a fairytale Cinderella-sorting-ashes or brave-and-loading-bullets sort of way.
As readers of fairy tales and fantasy-fiction know, names have power. So I let the word princess guide my brush. When I was stuck for a color choice, I whispered the word: princess. The taste of the word on my tongue gave me the flavor of the color I needed to use in that passage.
My favorite part of the painting, and the whole reason I wanted to paint this, is the shadow that curls under the sunlit eye. I love the way the curve describes the roundness of the cheek. There’s something delicate and fragile in that shadow, a sweetness and hope particular to young women.
Kate Detail Watercolor 23″ X 19″ 300# Arches hot press Copyright 2012 by Margaret Sloan
Then suddenly, as I approached the end of the painting, I recalled that her name is, or might be, Kate. If it’s not, it’s still the name of this painted princess-girl.
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Looking forward Watercolor on Arches 300# hot press Copyright 2011 by Margaret Sloan
It’s an odd, drifty feeling to paint without a teacher at my shoulder. It’s like being dandelion fluff caught on the surface of a pond, stuck to the water film but still blown about hither and thither (that thither-zone is an uncomfortable place!).
While I painted this picture, I anchored myself in the painter-pond by studying painters I liked. I kept those painters’ images on my computer, and every so often would take a break from my painting and run over to study how they handled a similar passage. I didn’t feel as if I were copying a master, but rather, as if I were asking a master a question.
I also talked incessantly to myself. I’m sure I sound like a muttering madwoman escalating into a full-blown fit: What color should go here? Should I use a warm red or a cool red? Can I get away with a purple or a green? How can I get this form to turn? Is the value dark enough yet? It’s too dark! Oh no, that’s Alizaron Crimson, it won’t lift off the paper! What am I going to do now? Gah! What am I thinking?!!!
At this point there is much wailing and whining, stamping of feet and tearing of hair. Then I do what Rose Frantzen recommends: I take a paper towel and clean my palette. She’s right. It’s calming. It resets my clock.
I’m stuck on the background of this painting right now. I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit, and will probably have to think about it a bit more. Turning and churning it in my head while I float about uninstructed.
Looking forward (Detail) Watercolor on Arches 300# hot press Copyright 2011 by Margaret Sloan
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6 years ago I got serious about my artistic development. Before, I’d always played at art—painting, drawing, leather masks, weaving—but I’d never spent concentrated time studying. Sure, I had ideas, but no skills to get those thoughts out of my head.
So I embarked on my own personal quest. Imagine the young (at least, younger than I am now) heroine setting off along a charcoal-dusty road.
I enrolled in the Atelier School of Classical Realism to study anatomy under Rob Anderson (4 years, every other Saturday). Along the way, I absorbed as much as I could from the school’s founder, David Hardy. I spent nearly every Tuesday night for 5 years working in watercolor with Steve Curl. I took workshops from Christian Fagerlund, Mary White, and Ted Nuttall. I studied color with Linda Lum. Most recently, I’ve been learning oil painting from Felicia Forte. They are all wonderful painters and teachers.
But recently during a workshop, as the teacher gave a short lecture on facial features, I realized that, because of the time constraints of a workshop, the instructor was pointing at a signpost on a road I’d already been traveling for half a decade.
A teacher is a good thing. They can stand at your shoulder and whisper directions into your ear, direct your hand, push you up the hill when you get stuck. But eventually the student has to do the work herself and synthesize all that she’s learned to create a thing that belongs to her.
I think that time has come for me. I need to hop off the classroom cart and travel on my own for a while. I need to take the paint-craft skills and ideas my teachers have given me and start a new quest in my studio.
I know that someday (probably soon) I’ll need to again join up with a teacher, but for now, I need to figure out some stuff on my own.
I need to spend some time walking down that painting road alone, on my own feet. Make solitary camp, live rough, and paint until my fingers bleed.
Mockingbirds at midnight 
