Yesterday, Sabrina came to pose; here's the finished underpainting. I had a tiny canvas panel of natural linen I'd been saving for a figure pose, and the pose she took was perfect. The 6x11 panel is being cropped, I suspect, by Typepad's iPhone client -- her feet are actually on the canvas. I was getting worried for a while, as my initial drawing was beating me up and taking my lunch money. Instead of having something decent laid in after the first sitting, I was still wrestling with the charcoal drawing after an hour. My heavy-handedness gets really problematic when using soft charcoal in a small space: a 1/16" line is fine on a large canvas, but on a small one, it gets ugly fast, as proportions get thrown off by a line that's no longer a line, but is becoming a plane, with a volume of its own.
I think I got there in the end, though. Next week, I'll glaze color over this and build up the lighter areas so that they've got volume.
In other news, I have work, and plenty of it. I'd love to have both money and time to take a vacation, but it's going to be a while before I have enough of either. Right now, though, I need coffee, and some lunch.
