ciana

Carbon pencil on Strathmore drawing, 10" x 14". 20 minutes.

next up is ciana, a texan very far from home. as always, i like to start with hands and i like to introduce a model with her hands ... so here she is.

i always leave the preliminary lines in a freehand drawing, rather than erase them (i only erase hand stamps or smudges). but rather than scrawl out a rough envelope or cloud of lines, i started by drawing the hands carefully, so that the final cut is on top of the preliminary lines over much of the drawing. i forgot to photograph this pose, but like it very much.

we did a life portrait and then got into photography, which we kept short due to the ongoing inclement weather (dark light). as ciana said, "in texas i'm used to it raining all day, but i'm not used to it raining and raining and raining ..." hey, us west county folks are not used to it either.

Fabriano Artistico CP 300 gsm, 12" x 9". 15 minutes.

at the end of our photo work i asked ciana to pose for another life portrait, facing me because she said she likes to watch.

i did this one without a preliminary pencil drawing; a nice feature of the fabriano paper is that paints which are still wet lift or blot easily, so i was able to sculpt the modeling on the fly, and then add details (nostrils, mouth contour, etc.) as it dried. hair and background were last.

ciana has spent the past four years cultivating a raging set of dreds, which will be a terrific challenge to paint ... even for a hair freak like me.