Sketched this while looking out my window. The western sun was hitting the trees and creating mysterious darks under the canopy of tree limbs. Probably could go darker in some areas to create more contrasts.
5 hours ago
I have spent most of the day reading about proportions and perspective of the figure. Until the placement of the parts of the body are firmly embedded in my memory, I will use the chart I worked up today based on the charts in the Loomis book, "Figure Drawing For All It's Worth", to double check myself when drawing.
I have joined with three artist friends to do a sketch a week of our local area or anything I see in this area. I am behind as this sketch was for last week lol. 
I started the study of Richard Schmid's "Fallen Pine" using the information provided by Katie Swatland at Swatland Studios. The link for "Fallen Pine" is from the Underpaintings blog. The photo was taken last night so it is rather dark but it shows the first two very thin layers. It is painted on 26" x 26" unstretched canvas which is going to be used as a window shade. Will see what the shade looks like hanging on a window when it is finished.



The Yahoo Colorful Watercolor group is studying NOTAN's which are black and white studies of the subject. Using one of my reference photo and according to Rhonda's instructions, I went to Photoshop Elements, desaturated the photo and put the contrast to its highest limit, which can be seen in the photo above.
I thoroughly enjoyed using the gessoed paper for this exercise as it was pretty easy to lift lights and correct a few shapes. It is a pretty fast way to subject the subject, becoming familiar not only with the values but with the shapes and the structuring the composition.

