Day 4

As I anticipated yesterday, drawing today was a very different experience from anything that has happened so far. Somehow, I began to achieve a certain depth in these drawings that almost all my previous attempts lack. Though there are elements in these drawings that I find jarring and annoying (notably the faces), I am functioning on an entirely different level than when I felt technically unable to push the paint around in the way I wanted. In fact, on days 1 and 2, I couldn’t even connect enough with my skills to know what I was trying to make happen. This is real progress.

When I was reading about Hokusai last night, I discovered that when he was making a drawing for wood block printing he would begin with a rusty colored under sketch and then make the finished and often altered final drawing on top in black. I realized that if I used a pale wash of a red with green mixed into it to neutralize the redness, I could create a kind of map of the figure and where things were located so that when I began to make my final, more lyrical descriptive lines, I would not have to figure out where they should go as well as how they should look. This way, I can make discoveries about proportion and form before I make my final lines and the lines do not imprison the form so much. They can describe an area instead. This is the first day of working this way, but because of it I was able to make steady progress throughout the four hours we worked.