Tracey Costescu Fine Art

Open Grisaille - Oil on Panel 6x8" well that is what I planned on doing this morning.  I thought I would start with a quick underpainting of a seashell that I have.  I set up the lights and quickly blocked in the angles and shape of the seashell on my panel using diluted asphaltum oil paint with mineral spirits. Then I got sucked in and rather than moving onto the color portion of painting, I ended up painting a very developed underpainting or open grisaille.  Oh well, it was too much fun to stop.  Working from life is so much fun, hard, but fun.   This will give me a chance to mix my paints properly while the first layer dries.  I have several shells that I have collected over the years so I plan to do at least on painting alla prima of a seashell....or many indirect seashell paintings.

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 her eyes were closed during the fir