Late this evening and before watching Goodbye Angelica (see next post), I’d had a painting session.  I think it lasted about an hour before I felt a bit of pain behind my eyes and had to close up shop for the night.  I painted, or sculpted – it’s really both, but heard someone compare it to paper maché and I get that now – a head.  I’m not sure what to  call that now.  If it were a painting or a drawing, I’d simply call it a portrait, and as a sculpture, it didn’t entirely make up enough anatomy to qualify as a bust (I stopped at the neck).  It was really interesting, calling on both my painting and sculpting skills at once.  It was awkward in the way that anything is when it’s new, but it felt very fluid and natural.  I know my way around the controller buttons and menus with some greater ease now, skipping quickly between the brush, selection and eraser tools and the ever-handy undo as I would in Photoshop.  So I was able to devote more focus to the object itself as I made it appear before me. 

This time I used an ellipse guide to build out the foundation of the head, and found this really helped in starting out with a sense of structure.  Once I had a base I knew what to do with it instinctually and this eased the pressure.  I used the ellipse guide again to paint out an eyeball, then duplicated it and inserted it into the head just as I would have done with clay.  It makes me think that it would be really interesting to have both a painter and a sculptor on my research team as both skillsets are equally called on. 

I did find it was a little hard to figure out what to do about shifting colour values.  I was using the oil brush and true to the medium, the angle of brush application influenced the value of light on the resulting stroke.  So I was trying to work with that, careening my arm around at funny angles trying to control the light and shadow according to the global light source.  It didn’t seem to make sense to go in with lighter and darker values of the colour to describe the transition from light to mid-tone to shadow as I would when painting.   I’m going to add that now to a list of questions I’m left with after that session, just to take note for later:

– How to paint in value transitions using tonal shifts?
– How to get a plane guide (doesn’t appear in the guid menu)
Resolved (22-07-20): Just use a cube grid and draw on one side of it.