Someone near and dear noticed last night that I haven’t posted a lot lately.  I’d like to say I’ve been busy – but that is really only half true.  I’ve been sick for the last week and haven’t felt like doing much of anything (productive).  That’s the second illness in four months… Before last September I’d gone 26 months between illnesses!  I long suspected that my immune system was kept ramped up by my brain while I was in grad school, telling my body I couldn’t “afford” to be sick – thus keeping my white blood cells ever vigilant.  The only time I became ill (in the program) was last September at the end of our break between trimesters.

Now that school is over and there is a (somewhat depressing) void of intellectual challenge I think my immune system assumed it could take some time off.

Regardless, I’ve still been working on new art projects.  I’ve been working on a second portrait for Sam, but also completed a new piece for the Hive (for the show opening this Saturday) and for the past three days I’ve been getting the sketch for the next Hive piece (the February show) right.

So here is a quick scan of that sketch done on the office copy machine (so the quality isn’t so great).  The show is called “lovers and haters”, but for some reason it went into my head as “two lovers” and so I worked on that premise.  I suppose I can just say this represents the “lovers” side.  I hope it is clear what is going on in this sketch…

I know it looks like a quickie little sketch – but it was actually probably ten hours of work to get to this point.  There were many many “thumbnail” sketches, actual model posing sessions (you can guess who played the guy and girl) and then multiple revisions on the nearly complete pose.  Also I did a fair amount of research on how people pose in weightless environments – and a fun/ny part of the research dealt with what the woman’s hair would look like.  Basically in space long hair just spreads out like a gigantic multi-directional afro.   You can see the original lines for that in the sketch above -but I eventually decided to have her hair bound up so it would only spread out at the end of the ponytail… otherwise the hair would have obscured too much of the man’s already barely seen face.

I’m nervous about completing this on an 11×14 canvas as there is so much fine detail required….   we’ll see how it turns out… it’s due in 23 days….