spine

Weeks and weeks ago I borrowed a model spine in order to do some drawings for this commission piece I'm working on. It took me forever to get around to doing the sketches, but I'm glad I did because these renderings came out so much better than the ones I'd done from blurry internet photos:

I appreciate these bones even more now that I know how they fit together. Your spine is an amazing piece of sculpture. Go give it a massage.

Here's the first layer of painting I did:

And here's the next layer, looking rather opaque and circus-y next to that nice loose wash above:

I traced the bone sketches in order to position them and transfer them onto the canvases (so the paper you see here won't actually be IN the paintings):

I did some more work on them today, and I'm excited to get pictures up of the next steps, not only because this layer was kind of uhg, but because they're really evolving quickly and starting to get interesting.

I think I'm getting better at trusting the process of painting -- of constantly tipping things into and out of balance, and back again -- but it still usually feels like jumping into the deep end. You trust you'll come bobbing back up to the surface eventually, right?

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