Illustrated Tuesday #2

I ate a great big bowl of excuses for breakfast today, so I could give you a hundred reasons why I haven't been keeping up with my themes or posting regularly. But excuses are lame, so I don't think I will. Instead I'll just give you a little Illustrated Tuesday post, along with some anecdotes from Italia.

I started the sketch below thinking that it would just be a rough thumbnail, something to reference while painting later on. Instead, I got a little carried away with the details and ended up with a finished product. As an ADHD kid who never grew up with any sort of focus, I always surprise myself when I get so wrapped up in a project that I forget to eat, breathe, or pee.

Graphite sketch of my bedroom window. Joa Stenning, Sept. 2011

All of my other sketches from Italy look much more like this:

Thumbnail sketch of the sunset from the roof of the villa.

Or like this:

View from a studio window.

They're much looser, lighter, and lacking in detail. In the middle picture there, you can see that I even made a diagram of what colors I saw across the skyline that night. Our instructor Will McCarthy's process is all about working from memory, so instead of taking pictures of anything and everything worth painting, I tried to sketch out my favorite scenes instead, with little notes and reminders. According to Will, this makes for a much more "emotional painting." 

When I look back at my "Something I'm Working On Sunday" post, I can see a huge difference from that piece and the much more "emotional" pieces I worked on in Italy. I don't necessarily think that my Sunday piece is bad or worse in any way--it's just completely different from anything I worked on with Will. It's a completely new process for me, and I'm interested to find some middle-ground between the two.

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