Day 100: Friday, June 24 - Drawing class

For the first time in ages I went to my portrait drawing class. It has met on Thursdays for years now under a wonderful teacher, April Foster.  We always have a live model for 3 hours, solely for portrait/figure work.  This week I had hired the model, Chad, a friend's brother. He did a fantastic job of sitting still with his extremely angular face.  I thought I did a great job of capturing him.

And then there's my friend in the class, Isao, a fantastic drawer of portraits with his sanguine pencil and his grey paper.  I persuaded Isao to give Chad this particular drawing.....an incredible treat to own one of Isao's drawings.

I don't know if you can see in the background the "conditions" of the classroom this time.  Someone had borrowed all of the conference tables from the room (we're in a senior center with a pre-school class of 3-4 year olds singing and chanting on one side of us and extremely senior folk eating lunch on the other side of us) and we've gotten tv tray tables, chair seats....anything with a level surface to draw on and created our space for the day.  Over the years we've hired some of the seniors with their interesting faces to model for us.  Seymour, for example, was one of our finer models:

And then we ran an ad in Craig's List for portrait models and Roman showed up. Another great face.

Day 77: Wednesday, May 4

I keep talking about Suzanne McDermott and her fabulous self-named blog. Carol Marine has mounted a self portrait challenge on the Daily Paintworks site...........Suzanne has a fabulous picture of herself, posing gracefully with some of the jewelry she has taken to making as she recovers from her horrible fall and horrible fractured leg, ankle, knee, shin...........I'm not sure what all she broke but it's a long, long recovery.  I saw this gorgeous photo of her

on her website and thought wouldn't it be fun if many people painted Suzanne this way and submitted their version of her to the Daily Paintworks Challenge.  She is feeling mentally and physically challenged at this moment and this could be just what she needs to perk right up. I wrote her about using this as her self portrait and her answer was so depressed that I think we should do it many tmes over.......remember Karin Jurick's self portrait that all of us painted?   I'd love it if Nancie Johnson? AnnMarie Thomas, April Foster, Michelene.....would take this photo, draw it up, paint it up and submit it to the Challenge.  Suzanne would be thrilled.  And then in your spare time you can all paint a portrait of yourself and submit that as well.  Paint, Paint, Paint................it's almost June and what do you have to show for yourself so far!!!!!!!!!!!  Get to painting.