Various sketches from classes

Sketch of a horse head cast, from Eduardo Fernandez's mentored drawing

Portrait Sketch/Underpainting for Craig Srebnik's Class

Life Drawing for James King's Workshop

I am on a major education kick.  Just taking tons of classes so I can break through to the next level.

Busy Holiday Season

If I wasn't busy enough with my art efforts for the holiday season, the local paper, Vancouver Voice requested the use of my crowning picture for a feature article on home birth.  I was in absolute shock and very breathless when I saw that they had put it on the cover!

Coming up this month are a few exciting events:


Stray Gallery's December 3rd show is Go Not Gently into this Good Night: The Neo-romantics present artistic explorations of death.  I am working diligently on a triptych of a war and death goddess, the Morrigan.  I have incorporated both traditional and new-age elements into this work.  For example, the addition of the three phases of the moon as halos.  However, the majority of the symbols are from the Red Branch Cycle of Irish legends.

Washer at Ford,Warrior Queen, Hag with Milk by Sara Star

The Free Modeling Guild is participating in a Holiday Bazaar at Jantzen Beach Mall Community Center December 4-5th.  I have made a bunch of new mounted prints for this. They are all currently listed in my Etsy Store and the Black Friday-Cyber Monday sale is 10% off.



Additionally, Angst Gallery where I showed in October has asked me to drop by a few pieces for their December show as well.

Week Three, again no new painting

I am undisciplined as of yet, and I prefer to flit between paintings. I worked a lot on three different paintings, and it looks as though I will get one of them done this week. I have been painstakingly correcting errors on the very large painting and laying down the under painting. Even with the careful preparatory drawings, there were some small color corrections to make, and I needed to fix some mistakes with placement of the feet and hands. Things that didn't really show until I saw the drawing larger.

Icon under painting by the hand of Sara Star

I have been delinquent on getting photographs of my progress on my various paintings. But here is a photo of an example of under painting. It is often just laying out the basic shading. I will update with more current photographs soon.

Projection and Transfering

A projected and traced image for a large painting by Sara Star

When I make a drawing for a new painting. I usually work at a size that is comfortable for my hand. Usually I draw 11 x 17 and smaller. When I am painting a picture the same size, I then make a photocopy of my drawing and use graphite transfer paper to transfer the image onto the painting surface.

I lay the transfer paper between the primed surface and my drawing and trace over the drawing with a pen or a stylus. I prefer drafting transfer paper because it is wax free. The wax can cause resist problems with my thin washes of acrylic paints. When I want to transfer an image onto a dark surface, I coat the back of the drawing with white conte crayon instead of using the dark transfer paper.

For blowing up an image there are several options. The classic option is to draw a grid on your drawing and a larger grid on your surface. This requires a lot of measuring, and counting. I find mathematical thinking pulls me out of the right brain thinking of drawing and I am likely to screw the whole thing up. Also, I don't like getting rid of the grid lines later.

For pictures around 3 feet tall, I scan my drawing, and then use a picture or publishing program to print it to size on tiles of paper and I tape the pieces of the picture together. Then I use the transfer paper method.

However, I sometimes work very very large. In these cases, I seek out projection equipment. At University, I had access to flat head projectors. Often for these I had to reduce the size of my drawing to fit into the projector, and then I hung the canvas on the wall and adjusted the projector to show my image. Then I would draw the image on with a soft conte or charcoal. It is important to use something soft that won't press the canvas in while you are drawing--moving the canvas moves where the projection falls.

Projecting an image with an InFocus Machine

However, I don't always have access to the flat head projector. And I have learned to make due with and even prefer to use In Focus Projectors. Often local libraries, community centers and nearby colleges have rooms with In Focus Projectors. I can balance my canvas on the chalk board and then project a scanned image of my drawing onto the canvas. The image projected by an In Focus projector is even more fiddly than with the flat head projector, and so I prefer to paint on the image as I trace to avoid pressing on the canvas at all.

My post on creating a drawing for a large painting

Preparations

When I am preparing to paint a new picture. I start with an idea. Often it is a spin off from a biblical story. I often wonder what happened to some of the women in the Bible. How they dealt with tragedies. Women seem to have a lot of subversive power in the Bible. And I like to rethink what that power means.

After selecting a story and fantasizing about the in between moments. I begin looking for inspirations visual, poetic and musical. For my feminist saints series, I usually unite master sculpture, iconography, and photographs to picture their stories.

Collage of inspirations for my current project

I am not yet an accomplished draughtswoman, but the next step is still essential.  I make a series of concept drawings to work out figures, composition, tone, and colors. When making smaller paintings, I often skip most of these steps because recoloring things that don't work on a small panel isn't a big setback. However, my current project is five feet tall. I need to be very prepared for this canvas.

Conceptual sketches of figure, tone, composition, and color.

I haven't started on the large canvas yet. I must admit, I am a bit scared to. However, satisfactory preparations will make the final project go faster and more smoothly than if I jumped straight in out of a misguided sense of haste. Might as well do it right the first time, rather then spend hours fixing hurried mistakes. Above you can see two different color sketches, the smaller one was the colors I had originally thought would work, I even went out and purchased Naples Yellow Hue--that was a mistake, when I put it next to Iron Oxide, I realized Naples Yellow Hue is Iron Oxide with white added. And my original color plan was unbalanced. A deep blue sky will be more balancing and compliment the figure's scarlet dress better than a light sky.

During one of my consultations with trusted advisers (My husband, roommates and brother usually oblige), My brother pointed out that my sketches are much like the sketches of masters like Dali, in that they are ugly and messy. However, those sketches still sell because they have the name attached. But truly these initial sketches are for the artist, to work out problems and to make the final product a masterpiece. Although now and then a sketch turns out to be quite nice in its own right.