Penny, Brockweir, 18. 05. 2010.

The two warm up drawings in the morning were done by attaching a pastel to a long piece of willow.

For the two afternoon ones I used a black conte' pastel but not attached to a stick. I am really pleased with these drawings particularly the second one.

I am very disappointed with this painting and was tempted not to put it on the blog , but the whole point of blogging for me is to record both progress and lack of it and hope to learn from it.
Last weeks effort was much better ( I have put them together below ) and I hoped to build on it this week. Up until lunchtime things were going reasonably well. but after the break I seemed to lose direction and started making poor decisions. The whole thing started to tighten up and it ended up looking very wooden. There are some areas that I like and that is what I must take encouragement from. I quite like the hair, her right hand, the shadow across her chest and her left knee. An artist whose blog I follow referred to the bits you like as ' baby steps 'and that is exactly what it feels like at times.

Things I will do differently next time include not using the thinned down mixture of vermillion and ultramarine to under paint the lighter areas as it made everything look dirty,not use the light red as much as it is too opaque and try not to lose the element of loose drawing that exists in the earlier stages . I also need to check the measurements more carefully as I can now see that the shoulders and legs are wrong.