6th entry for Apr. 24, 2012

These are a 10-minute and a 15-minute pose that ended the evening with S-  .  The 10-minute one is done with a hard Nobel charcoal stick on 24 x 36" Durotone Extra White, and the longer study is on a 22 x 30" sheet of Maidstone rag paper with the same material.
The lower one was extensively reworked texturally afterwards, with more charcoal, a blending stomp, eraser and paper towel. It's not a perfect image, but it is quite striking, and does situate S-- into more of a definite, if ambiguous, space.
Somewhere between these two images would I believe be the ideal degree of tonal/background development for my present tastes.

4th Entry for March 1, 2010

These were 15-minute and 20-minute poses. As a teen, I was very into sword-and-sorcery epics, and I was finding that R-'s pose with the staff, combined with his what I was seeing as a `Prince Valiant'-y haircut was evoking a Parsifal/Beowulf kind of vibe for me, which I enjoyed.

The AGO space is the sonic equivalent of a shopping mall. All around one can hear instruction being given, and social games being played between talkative painting students. In spite of all the surrounding sounds, I was having a fairly `on' morning that day, and was setting down forms fast enough that I was able to get a fair bit of background drawn as well. I was conscious of using `atmospheric perspective', diminishing contrast in the distance. The big staircase leading down to the AGO class area made for some interesting divisions of the background space.

I contrast the AGO's open sessions with those at the TSA, where someone rustling a plastic bag can be breaking the quiet. Perhaps because I have no investment in the space or the running of the session at the AGO, I can more easily ignore the outside stimuli there. Or maybe I am associating the hubbub with that space, and can incorporate it more readily into the drawing moment.

R- 's pose with his portable game console made me think that that is one thing I have yet to encounter: a model texting or reading his or her Blackberry while posing. People read books now and then, but not tech devices, yet. It's only a matter if time, I reckon.

2nd entry for February 17, 2009

These were the first two of four 20-minute poses L- took.

5th Entry for January 11, 2009

I stayed on for the afternoon, where Z- was doing one long pose for 3 hours. I did one 2-hour drawing with the dark background on newsprint, and followed that with one done on a big sheet of Japanese paper, for the last hour