Tracey Costescu Fine Art

Graphite Portrait on Toned Paper - 6x9" Well I finally did it, I finally made it down to check out Basic Inquiry Life Drawing in Vancouver.  Why did it take me so long??!?!? I usually go to Suite E Life Drawing in Coquitlam but I have been so busy with teaching at nights that I only made it to a few sessions this season so I was desperate to get some life drawing in...and I was not disappointed :) The set up was really nice as they have a curtain that hangs from the ceiling with the lighting enclosed which can be directed on the model.  Then the outside of the curtain area hey have florescent lighting so that there is good lighting on the easels...which is kind of important ;) Room Set Up The model was lovely and was so enjoyable to draw.  The session is 3 hrs but with breaks works out to about 2.5 hrs and I draw sooo slooooww.  So I had hoped to get more darks in on the left side of her face and then add some lights with white chalk and if time permitt...

It has been months since I have been able to get to a life drawing session (sigh) so it was so nice to get back to drawing from a live model last night!  Sadly I have not had much time for drawing anything lately as have been busy painting.  Drawing is like exercise, if you don't do it daily or at least regularly you get flabby....or in this case, not so accurate ;) So rather than crop the drawing as I usually do...I left some distracting objects all around the portrait.  Sneaky right?  Even with my lack of current practice though, I still see a huge improvement from last year in my drawing skills so just like with exercise, there is "muscle memory" so every little bit of effort adds up.

Portrait of Caitlin from Life Session So sad that there are only a few sessions left for the season, I am going to miss it!  Last night was a sustained session with Caitlin, one of my favourite models.  She is amazingly still and oozes grace, very inspirational. I would have loved even just another 15 minutes, of course there is never enough time and I barely got the darker values in her hair started and time was up.  It is funny because I used to draw much faster, but of course then I would get to the end of the night and notice an eye sliding off, slow is definitely better. Today I started another drawing from life from one of the images from my beloved Charles Bargue Drawing book which I am slowly working my way through.  This book will keep me busy for so many years to come.  I plan to do a drawing a day to get my drawing chops in shape for my upcoming class  Drawing From Life for the Beginner   at Port Moody Art Center starting June 1....

Life Drawing Portrait of Gina It seems like forever since I have been able to make it to Suite E Life Drawing at Port Moody Art Center, I was worried I would not remember how to draw! Although I did not get nearly enough done on this, I was so happy to get the chance to draw from a model again that I really didn't care.  It is darker in real life as my darn flash kept going off on my camera and I was too lazy to find my detachable flash which directs the light at the ceiling rather than at the subject. I have been busy painting in watercolor and acrylic lately and did not realize how much I have missed drawing.  I see a lot more sketching in my immediate future! Plus I have to get back in the drawing groove for my upcoming Drawing From Life for the Beginner classes at Port Moody Art Center starting June 1, you can register at http://register.asapconnected.com/courses.aspx?coursegroupid=9898 if you are interested.  Please register early as registration closes pr...

Graphite Pencil Sphere on Paper not as many as you would think! I have never really drawn a sphere without some sort of crutch, ie grid lines, compass or masking tape roll.  I honestly did not think would be so easy to get a relatively perfect sphere, ok so it is not perfectly round, but I think it is pretty close.  Basically I used four straight lines to form a box  around the sphere and then filled in the spaces between the lines to form a circle, using smaller and smaller straight lines.  It took shape much more quickly (well, that term is relative I guess) than I had expected.  The shading, using only a 2H and H pencil on the other hand, took much longer than I had expected.   The pencil leads were sharpened with sandpaper to a lethally sharp point and the values were built up very slowly and methodically working from the terminator (point where the light no longer reaches) to the highlight.  The idea is to work only in one area at a t...

Grisaille - Oil on Panel - 8x10"  This is the first oil pass of the grisaille for a piece I am working on.  The original drawing can be viewed at http://tcostescu.blogspot.ca/2014/07/shell-leaf-pitcher-study-graphite-on.html   For this painting I transferred the drawing onto the panel using an oil transfer (I will blog about how to do this in the near future). Once the transfer was dry, I did a light burnt umber layer to workout the main values, unfortunately I forgot to take a photo of this step. Next time ;) When the burnt umber layer was completely dry, I used my pre-mixed oil paints from a value of 2 to 9 (2 darkest value, 9 near white value)  At this stage I focused on trying to really correctly record the tilts and angles of my subjects from my still life set up.  Working from life is more challenging than working from a photo but so much more fulfilling as there is just so much more information about the form to work from. The paint is app...

Life Drawing - Francoise Sketch So happy to be back at our life drawing sessions and at our new digs at Port Moody Art Association.  This is from the second session which was a sustained session.  In other words, we have a few warm up poses for 1 minute each and then the model is in the same pose for the rest of the night. I prefer to do portraits so I honed in on her face as I never have time to do a whole figure.  I posted the process shots below.  Each image below represents a 25min sitting. I was surprised to get so much done in the first 25min on the block in...perhaps I should have spent more time but hey, I was excited to get going.  I am really trying to focus on using straight lines only and blocking in the major shapes before moving to the smaller shapes.  As you can see, by the time I got to her lips I had already added too much detail rather than thinking about the larger form.  Her eyes I had just roughed out the socket area as h...

Pencil Drawing on Stonehenge Paper in Progress I decided to start a separate blog to document my fine art training that I have been working on.   I just realized that from my commissions blog which I have not updated sinc February that it looks like I have been up to a whole lot of nothing. Not true! I have been studying the classical method of drawing and painting which takes much more time but I think the results are so worth it. The drawing I am currently working on still needs a fair bit more work but it is getting there.  The darks seem to take a lot more time to build up on this paper and using harder pencils.  I intend to do an oil painting of the drawing once it is completed.  Normally I do a very rough sketch or a mock up in photoshop prior to starting a painting.  I decided this time around I really wanted to work out as many issues as possible before I even get to the canvas.  I may also do a monochromatic oil study and then a full color ...