I've continued to develop my underpainting. I'm always anxious to jump ahead into the color stage from here, but I am disciplining myself to stay with values for a while longer. It just makes the rest of the painting so much easier if I develop the underpainting as much as possible before moving ahead.

I'm thinking about adjusting my underpainting medium - it dries too fast, and now that I am working on my underpainting longer, I'm realizing I begin to race just to paint faster as the medium dries. It's got more thinner in it than the oily painting medium, and it pretty much sets up in a day. So after 6 hours of painting, my paint begins to get sticky - ugh.

There's an amazing ecroche class being offered in February 2010 by Andrew Ameral. The SF Bay Area is so lucky to have Andy, he's returned from teaching at Florence Academy for 7 years. Anyway, ecroche is building a model in clay of a flayed human figure, starting from the bones and layering up through the layers of muscle. I am so hoping to be able to take the class!

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