The New City of York!

The Hein Academy of Art hits Times Square!

We went to this art store to grab some supplies for an open drawing session. As I was standing in line to purchase some paper and pencils I was still debating whether I wanted to buy the supplies and go to the drawing session that night...a man in line behind me (Edward) started chatting and I briefly told him my dilemma. He encouraged me to take advantage of every opportunity to go places, meet people, and experience life. He said, "You're always one interaction away from getting everything you've always wanted." I felt inspired and ready to get out there and make my dreams come true!
Unfortunately, when we arrived at the drawing session we discovered it had been cancelled. So anticlimactic.

Emily and I on our way back to the hotel. I was a little worried the man taking this photo was going to run off with my fancy camera so I didn't want to step back too far...fortunately, he was trustworthy.

My favorite poster at our hotel, The Soldiers’, Sailors’, Marines’, Coast Guard and Airmen’s Club

I'd never really been that inspired by Rembrandt before, but his paintings were amazing in person! I LOVE this one in particular!
Hendrickje Stoffels by Rembrandt
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Christ with a Staff by Follower of Rembrandt
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Salome, 1870 by Henri Regnault
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

This was one of my favorite paintings at The Met. While it is beautifully painted, I think the subject matter is what appeals to me the most about it.
Joan of Arc, 1879 by Jules Bastien-Lepage
The Met

A whole room of paintings by John Singer Sargeant. He's great!

texting?

Another of my favorites!! Something about the way this was painted really appealed to  me. LOVE it!
King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1 by Edwin Austin Abbey
The Met

 detail of King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1 by Edwin Austin Abbey

our group outside The Met

Hispanic Society of America. Beautiful building and paintings!

I like how loosely Sorolla painted this figure, but it reads so well. See detailed photo below.
Porfiro Diaz, Former President of Mexico, 1911 by Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida
Hispanic Society of America

Art Show/Portrait Drawing Session

I'm finally posting some pictures from the Art Show/Portrait Drawing Session that was held September 28th at the Hein Academy of Art. Advanced students at the academy displayed their artwork and Jeff Hein presented two religious paintings he recently completed for the Honduras LDS Temple. His paintings are incredible (see pics below)! I especially love the one of Christ healing the multitude. He painted both pieces completely from life, meaning he had each model come pose for him individually (on several occasions) rather than using photographs as references. It is beautifully done and inspiring to me!

One objective of this event was to help raise money for an educational art trip we are taking to New York City (next week) to visit several art museums and galleries. Early in the evening people could bid to have a portrait done that night, or they could buy a raffle ticket for the chance to win a portrait by Jeff Hein or one of the advanced students, to be scheduled for another day.

Jeff painted a portrait that night and several of us drew portraits. It was good experience drawing with an audience and on a strict timeframe (although I didn't get close to finishing).

Overall it was a lovely evening. Thanks to everyone who came to support us!

Steve introducing the evening's events

Me and my parents in front of my art

Jeff Hein's painting of Christ

Jeff Hein's painting of Christ healing the multitude

Jeff beginning his portrait

The portrait nearing completion, after about 3 hours!

 Jenna and Skip drawing portraits

Me, Sarah, Heather and Emily drawing

Thanks to my lovely model, Claudia

Art Show This Friday, Sept. 28

Jeff Hein and the Hein Academy of Art students will be having an art show this Friday night at the Hein Academy (Hein Academy of Art – East Building, 11 E. 700 S. Salt Lake City, UT 84101) from 5:30 - 9:30 pm. Artwork will be displayed and Jeff and some of the students will be drawing portraits during the evening. For more details, visit the Hein Academy blog at: http://heinacademyofart.com/home/blog and see the post from Sept. 21.

There is also a post on the Hein Academy blog (Sept. 23) featuring ME and my current self-portrait adventure!

Why so serious?

Yes, I know I look angry in this painting. No, you aren't the first person to tell me that. Do you really want to know why I look a little put off in this picture? First of all, I had to stare at myself in a mirror for one hundred hours...yes, that's right, 100 hours! YOU try holding a smile for that long. Secondly, it should not have taken me 100 hours to paint this! And third, who smiles in a self-portrait? Seriously (no pun intended), I did a little looking and easily found some examples of artists NOT smiling for their self-portraits...see below. 

I finished my self-portrait last April. It took me about four months to paint it and it was a challenge! I did change the lighting about 20 hours into it so that didn't help, but it took me a lot longer than I expected. I kept painting the same things over and over again each day, trying to get them right. All of those hours could feel like a waste of time, but then I remember that it takes 10,000 hours to get really good at something so it's not a waste when I realize those 100 hours were moving me towards my goal of mastering painting!

I've done a few other paintings since this one and recently decided to re-visit the self-portrait theme to see if I've improved my paint quality and/or gotten faster in the last four months. I started the new self-portrait a couple weeks ago and so far it feels like it's moving more quickly, but time will tell. I've been taking periodic pictures of my progress so it will be fun to see the succession when it's completed.

Rembrandt

Vincent Van Gogh

John Singer Sargeant

Mary Cassatt

Vermeer

Jeffrey Hein

Degas

Details, please.

Hooray, I finally photographed some of my paintings! This is a still life I finished in August with items taken from my mother's bookshelves. It was a challenge because of the structure of the Eiffel Tower, the ellipses on the teapot, and all those darn details! The Eiffel Tower was a bugger, but the image on the teapot was pretty fun to paint.

It took me 70 hours to do this, but that was dragged out over three months! Yikes. It was a fun summer.

Yin and Yang

We started a new model session last week and after the first day we decided to change the pose. Instead of using a new sheet of canvas paper, I just turned the page upside down and started again. The picture on the left shows how it looked on Monday with the two figures. I kind of like it...it reminds me of the pisces sign or yin and yang. I just learned that yin and yang literally means, "shadow and light," which is appropriate for my painting. :)

The picture on the right was taken after the model session today. It's starting to look more like him.

 

I'm ready for my close up, Mr. DeMille

(5 points for anyone who can name that movie quote)

On Thursday nights a few of us at the academy chip in for an extra model session. Even though I've been focusing on painting for my daily curriculum, I like to draw on Thursday nights to get a little more practice with charcoal and keep up my drawing skills. I did each of these drawings in 3 or 4 sessions (9-12 hours).

Kinda Cute, Kinda Creepy

The title says it all.  I'll just add that I did this in 11 hours, which was good for me.

Slow Down to Speed Up!

I started painting at the Hein Academy almost one year ago, but I haven't posted any of my paintings yet. Mostly because it's hard to photograph paintings without a glare, but I want to post some of my recent progress so please excuse the poor photo quality (these were taken on my phone).

Recently Jeff had me do a couple painting exercises where I focused on breaking down the value shapes into planes. It took me a couple days to get the hang of it, but once I made myself slow down and get the values right I felt like my accuracy and speed sky rocketed! This reminded me of something I've heard Jeff say. He tells us if we want to finish a painting or drawing faster we need to slow down and get it right the first time. So wise, so wise.

Here is an example of my assignment:

 

I started a new painting on Monday using the same technique, but being a little less rigid with the planes. It has helped enormously. With previous paintings I felt like I kept painting over the same area again and again each day to try and get the values (and shapes) right, but by blocking the correct values in at the beginning it saves me countless hours of frustration. It sounds so obvious, but it has taken me a while to really comprehend how to overcome that problem.

By the way, this was one of my childhood toys. I think she's cute, but there seems to be a creepy consensus regarding this little one. I suppose I agree.

 

Jeff Hein Drawing Demonstration

A 3 1/2 hour portrait drawing by Jeff Hein reduced to 8 minutes.
It's pretty amazing watching this drawing come to life. I hope to be this good someday!



watch on youtube: http://youtu.be/7qpq3hOoMpo

This Little Piggy

This is one of my favorite drawings because I love the adorable Asian piggy bank I got in Cambodia. Up to that point in my drawing curriculum I had mostly drawn from white plaster casts so I was curious to see how I handled a darker subject matter. I decided to use black charcoal as well as white charcoal for this one, which made it feel more like a painting with the blending I did for the correct values. Jeff suggested I find another object that was a different kind of material and lighter in color to draw with my Asian piggy. I perused my house and found the perfect little white porcelain bank to be friends with my Asian pig for the 39.5 hours they got to model for me while gathering dust. I'm pretty sure they're BFF's now.

The Feat of a Foot

There is a blog for the Hein Academy of Art which isn't updated often, but about a year ago one of Jeff's assistants was posting on it fairly regularly. She did a short post about me and this drawing of a foot. You can check it out here:
http://heinacademy.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/a-feat-of-a-foot/
I spent 37.25 hours on this one.

Shape Up or Ship Out

On my second day at the Hein Academy I started a series of assignments to practice seeing and copying simple shapes. When I thought my first drawing looked good enough, I asked Jeff to take a look. He told me some minor changes to make on a couple of the shapes. I was a little surprised at how picky he was being, but he explained that the foundation to a good drawing is getting every shape as perfectly accurate as you can. If you're doing a portrait of someone, those small discrepancies will determine whether it looks like the person or not.

After that first critique I realized "good enough" was not good enough. The standard to which I had previously held my work was no longer satisfactory. If I wanted to progress in the curriculum and really improve as an artist, I had to raise my standard to Jeff's...which is basically perfection. No biggie.

I practiced seeing the basic shapes on the model or object I was drawing, which meant simplifying the form and value to only black and white. Here are two drawings I did using that technique.

A year and a half later I'm constantly reminded that the foundation to every drawing or painting is the underlying shapes. It doesn't matter how beautifully the marks are made or the colors blended. If the drawing is off, it won't look or feel right. Sometimes I will notice a drawing error after I've spent weeks on an assignment. I often can't believe I was able to stare at the drawing for hours on end and not notice the nose was too long (or whatever the problem is)! I have to constantly remind myself to check the drawing, over and over again, especially because an adjustment in one place will necessitate an adjustment in another place, which affects something else, and so on.

At the Hein Academy each student progresses in the curriculum at their own pace. After about four months and 241 hours of studio time (not ALL of which was spent drawing, but most of it was), I moved on to drawing in "full value," which basically meant I could draw all the variations of gray in between black and white. Yippee! This was one of my first full value assignments, costing me 25.75 well spent hours of my life.