After Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring" (colored pencil; 8" x 6")

After Vermeer's" Girl with a Pearl Earring"

Vermeer by Pierre Cabanne; Prismacolor pencils; and my Canson Mi-teintes sketchbook

After Vermeer's "The Milkmaid" (detail)

After Vermeer's "Girl with a Red Hat"

After Vermeer's "Girl with a Flute"

I can't sleep on the airplanes.  Unable to settle into a comfortable position, I keep shifting my body.  My neck, shoulders, and lower back become all knotted up and achy.  I get myself caffeined up to compensate the increasing fatigue.  Both flights for my recent trip to Kauai were long and tedious.  I usually bring a book or two to read.  For this trip, I had something better to while away the time as a captive in a tight space on a noisy plane.

In Lisa Semerad's portrait class last summer, I learned a time-honored technique of using black drawing tools with a white chalk on a toned ground for figure drawing.  Many great masters, such as Da Vinci, Rubens, Watteau, and Degas, had used it in their studies for paintings.  I learn at their feet with reverence, and had spent many hours copying their drawings in the past. 

My teacher for the trip was the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, whose exquisite, domestic interior scenes of the 17th-century-middle-class Delft have captivated art lovers for centuries.  I love his exceptional sense of light and quietude.  A small book by Pierre Cabanne with lots of reproductions of his paintings was the first item I packed for my art survival kit.  I made a small sketchbook with Canson Mi-teintes paper and also equipped myself with several Prismacolor pencils (white, three shades of grays, black and burnt ochre).  These colored pencils are waxy, dust-free, and don't smear. 

Although one can never have loads of fun during an air travel, I still managed to spend several enjoyable hours until I couldn't see anymore with my watery eyes.

"Sarah" (graphite and chalk; 16" x 12")

Today was the last session of Lisa Semerad's figure drawing (short pose) class at the Art League School in Alexandria, VA.  To top off our nine-week forays into the fascinating world of figure drawing, we were assigned to a two-hour-long pose with just a bit of instruction about different kinds of paper and drawing tools.

I chose a warm, mid-toned Canson Mi-teintes paper, since it seemed to match her skin tone fairly closely.  Getting the pose down wasn't hard.  The challenge for me was to get hatching right.  Last week, Lisa showed the different types of hatching--simple, contour, planar, and cross--and told us to practice at home.  Have I done that?  Of course, not. 

And working with white chalk as well as graphite made things really exciting (i.e., confusing).  The paper provides the mid tone; graphite pencils, darks; and white chalk, the highlights.  If you mix graphite and white chalk, you get a disgusting blue gray!  They don't come into contact, excpet where there is an abrupt change of planes from dark to light.

Two hours was a long time for us, a luxury--enough time to get the drawing right, add values, work the environment which the model occupied into the composition, and fiddle.  The model's right knee got a whole lot of white highlights, for instance.  It comes forward too much.  Oh, well.