Aquarelles are no better than Conte - they don't make as much dust, so don't screw up the paint as much, but still they smear into the paint. Now I understand why people block in directly in oil paint! The same color as the underpainting will be.

Last night I discovered Control+Paint, the website of the concept artist who's video I posted last night, where he teaches about drawing and painting digitally. Makes it all seem so easy and nice - but I had a super-frustrating day trying it today. I swear, very 30 seconds or so I was growling "NOW WHY THE HELL DID THAT JUST HAPPEN!!??!?!!"

I also realized that I really can't draw the figure starting from boxes or ovals or anything - I just need to draw the damn figure directly, and then I can fiddle around with bloxing off and measuring etc.

When I start by drawing a ribcage I just quite simply can't understand how the shoulders fit in - I don't leave enough room for them between the chest and head. I don't know - I feel like crap - maybe Im just being all down on myself. I know I was starting to work out a system. But what the hell - why wasn't the system already worked out long ago? Why with all the figure drawing and anatomy books doesn't anybody tell you about problems like this? Or is it just a failing on my part to understand what I've read? Ah crap - I just need to keep at it - I'm trying to transform myself as an artist and it aint gonna be easy.

Looking at the ecorche I just realized the shoulders can be visualized as balls sitting right onthe ribcage. Maybe I can work it out in drawings.

Oh, I should mention, each night after I paint I have little snippets of painting stuff turn up in strange ways in my dreams - I remember one two nights ago where I gave Lauren a guitar to be restrung and it had little varicolored dabs of oil paint all over the back of it! Hah! It was a palette! There were others too, but I didn't write them down and, as dreams tend to do, they vanished.

Ok, couldn't just let it go at that. This is my 2nd try - 1st sucked because made shoulderballs too big and too high. Another thing I did here was to stop thinking of the neck as a simple cylinder rising from the top pair of ribs, instead saw it as rising from shape bordered by clavicles and scapulae. I sort of drew that shape in after the shoulderballs and before the neck and head. I think I make necks too short and skinny. It also helped to look at the ecorche - helped to keep shape of robcage in line, I tend to make it bulge to far at the wide point. But this feels good because, for the first time in this whole explosion of drawing/painting, this one really looks like my style. 

Also, I've come to realize that, as I read somewhere recently, the best paint is undoubtedly fresh paint. I don't want to repeat that mucking about with super-sticky crap as it's drying and refuses to act right. So I guess I'll scrap the idea of keeping my tube paints in an airtight pill compact and the palette in something equally airtight. Ya just gotta waste some paint every freaking time - as much as it sucks.