Spent some time washing oil again, this time linseed; the Azure Farms one. It does seem like a beautiful oil, clear and fragrant. There's something nice about it, quite unlike that atomic turmeric orange-colored stuff I bought from the supplement store. That was flax oil on steroids, I swear (got rid of the color with some time in the sun).  I'm going to heat-body this one.. a hunch it might be the go-to oil for the putty I'll be using.

Picked up some more panels today. I plan to prepare a few different grounds to work on as a way to see what I like best  ...gesso, gesso on linen, lead ground. even going to try out one of those Dibond panels, although foam core aluminum is not in keeping with my usual habit of sticking to the tried and true. But you never know. I'll either love it, or it will confirm the value of sticking with older materials and methods. 

And the pigments... ground up some really gorgeous Spanish ochre rocks last week. The color is amazing. I have yet to see it ground in oil, but it was a pleasure to work with. Easy to grind. I tried both sieving and levigating it to compare. The levigation method is definitely superior, yielding a brighter and clearer color thanks to all the darker, denser material sinking to the bottom of the pan. I would think the grain size would  be more varied, as well, compared to the sieved grains. This would suggest a more organic look and feel to the painted surface, however difficult to see with the naked eye. At least it would be more luscious to paint with, simply knowing that about it. That's what's I love about handmade materials. There's an intimacy involved in really knowing one's materials at such depths.

... that being said, I can't promise I'll ever achieve working with 100% handmade stuff. But it's a joy to work with when I can.

I want to learn "to work with the materials at a fundamental level until [I] understand them well." Tad Spurgeon speaks exactly to what I'm after. To pursue painting as a method of cultivation, much like the practice of tea. Mastery comes with intimate knowledge of not only the tea, but also the water, the method of brewing, the teaware, etc... So it is with painting, it seems. It must be approached as a discipline., with mindful dedicated practice.

Time to resurrect the blog. Surprisingly synchronous events have taken place and I'll be back in a new studio, just a short walk from my old one, in just a few weeks time. I can hardly wait. Been hard at work preparing for the move in more ways than I care to comment on. For now, here's a fun little online test for artists and painters to check out your sensitivity to color -- http://www.xrite.com/online-color-test-challenge

The first time I tried it I got a score of 12. I had the hardest time with the blues (blue-green, blue-red). Maybe that explains my general lack of excitement for the color blue? Second time around was an 8 (damn blues). I'm having fun with this little time-waster.

If, by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

So here's what 45 minutes can produce, while listening to Yo-Yo Ma, which was the perfect music for today. But this is just a start. Still very rough and in need of refinement of planes, not to mention details. I plan to play with it some more (and hopefully know when to stop). One of the most enjoyable things about this particular work was that it felt as though my hands were far more knowledgeable about the subtler forms of the face and head. Much more confident. Clearly the skull sculpt has been a valuable exercise (although I didn't touch it today).

I'm sure doing all these deep muscles is overkill, but I'm honestly having fun. Still struggling with trying to figure out which muscles go under others and which go over, especially for these deep muscles, but I'm hoping it'll all work out in the end. I do have a 3-D model of a facial ecorche but the deep muscles don't show, so it's not much help at this point.

Both of the muscles around the eye socket and the mouth start with "Orbicularis", which I'm guessing means something like "circular muscle", since they're both uniquely round (I haven't yet drawn in the muscles fibers on the mouth below, so it looks more smooth and skin-like -- I'll fix that next time).

Front view -- it looks a little off proportionally, but I think that's because I haven't put in the cartilage and muscles around the nose. Once that's in the nose will appear a bit lower than the nasal hole that's there now.

All that careful work I did on the right side of the skull, and now you're going to see the roughly-finished left side since that's the side I'm doing the musculature on. Oh well.. it'll soon be covered.

Now that I'm on to the ecorche' part I'm relying most heavily on a fantastic book -- Human Anatomy for Artists, by Eliot Goldfinger. A great resource as it isolates each individual muscle, showing exactly where it lies, where the origin and insertion points are and how thick it is. It's not a 3-D model, but it's the next best thing thanks to the thorough explanations and illustrations. It wasn't as helpful in modeling the skull, but for the muscles this book is great. My only complaint is that it doesn't seem to be laid out in the order that a sculptor would lay on the muscles, so I'm jumping around in the book and trying to figure out which muscles lie under and over each other. A bit of a challenge, but good for learning.

Skeletal part is *done*. I added the first rib and the front of the clavicles since some of the neck muscles attach there. Not having a full size skeleton model, though, I mostly roughed these in. I went to study an actual human skeleton that a friend of mine has access to, but while it helped some there were limitations. Nothing beats having a model right next to your sculpture to refer to, but I could only take photos of this specimen for my use. And anyway, it was a 4' 10" tiny little specimen, so it was like looking at a somewhat miniaturized version. But finally it's on to the musculature!