Thank Ernie, I appreciate your kindness!

I'm glad you encouraged me to take on the challenge. Not sure if I'll finish this one soon, I might have to put it on the back burner for now.
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So I really love the Fine Art program at my local community college. The way it works here is the first year of studio classes is devoted to drawing (first semester, Drawing 1: Fundamentals, second semester Drawing 2: Figure drawing) and the second year is painting (first semester Painting 1: Painting techniques, second semester Painting 2: Kind of a hands-on, modern art history class), and then there is an optional third year that is called Advanced Drawing and Painting where we're given our own area of the studio to set up and work out of, and we pick an artist to study as a jumping off point, and then eventually start creating our own work, our own projects based on what we studied, rather than work on assignments that we're given. At the end of the third year, the Advanced students get to exhibit the best of their body of work in the school art gallery, which is actually quite a beautiful space. The exhibition sort of works as extra incentive to produce lots of good, quality work during the year.
I've just started this third year of studio classes. Honestly, I'm a pretty self-driven art student on my own. When I'm not in school I study well by myself, in fact I get really obsessed with it. But I started this program, not for the motivation, but because I knew it would probably help to speed up my learning process with the fundamentals and I was excited to learn to paint from the knowledgeable artist and skilled teacher that I knew our instructor is. I have indeed learned a lot in the last, two short years I've been in school.
I've got to say that learning painting has broadened the scope of my ambitions. Where before I was only interested in learning to draw so that I could get good at making comics and illustrating, now I have developed a real love for both traditional and digital painting, in addition to my love of figure drawing. My new short-term goal is to begin to learn to paint the figure well and to paint portraits. I've already put in a lot of work studying the head and I plan on putting much more work in studying the figure and into learning new methods of constructing the head. I've been watching
Jeff Watt's Friday Night Live Workshops on youtube, and so have been getting very interested in studying the Reilly method that he often references. I've been basing my current studies of the planes and rhythms of the head off of his many recommendations to study the Asaro heads and the Reilly abstractions. Lately I've been seriously considering going through Jeff's online school program, as an affordable alternative to going out to San Diego and studying there in person; perhaps I'll have time for the online school after I've finished the art program here. I've also been getting a lot out of
Will Terrell's People Sketching videos, and
Stan Prokopenko's figure drawing videos, especially the gesture series. I've been going out periodically with my classmates to coffee shops, shopping malls, the airport, etc...trying to do what Will does in his People Sketching videos and failing miserably, but keep enjoying the process and keep trying to do it and at least getting better each time we go out.
My passion right now is all about figure drawing and portraiture even though I still love the idea of being a comics artist and want to illustrate, I also would love to make figure paintings and possibly narrative paintings, portraits, and things like that. The artist I've chosen to study this year in our Advanced class is Caravaggio because his paintings are totally bad-ass. I have a strong attraction to a lot of the baroque painters though, and I've been looking at a lot of Rubens and Rembrandt as well. I've expressed to my instructor that I am more interested in studying the figure, to draw and paint in the endless repetition that is necessary to master the figure, than in studying any one specific artist, and he's encouraged me to work on this, but also to perhaps not let my figurative goals be an end in itself but in addition to these studies to find the
why behind the great masters works, to discover other related ideas in this pursuit, be it ideas of idealism, or conversely, to portray the conditions of the experiences of life. These next couple semesters promise to be very challenging and very exciting to me. I'll work at posting my progress throughout.
I'm curious do any of you go out People Sketching the way Will Terrell does? If so, how successful have you been with it? Did you get good results right away? The first time I went out I was so bad I almost never went back, haha. How about any members here who have attended Jeff Watt's atelier or online school? Or any atelier for that matter? I'd love to hear about it.
So here's what I've been working on in the studio this past couple weeks:
Master study after 17th century Dutch painter Gerard van Honthorst -
Head plane studies (Asaro heads) -
Head abstractions after the Reilly meothd as I understand it -
Gesture drawings using the Stan Prokopenko method. I sharpened my pencil such that I can hold it like a stick of charcoal or paint brush to have more fluid lines, drawing from the shoulder with an increased range of motion, rather than holding the pencil like a writing instrument. I can tell this way of drawing will take a while before it feels comfortable.
Master studies after Caravaggio -

- Nicely rendered turds. This my friends is why you don't rush past the drawing phase just to get to the "fun part" of rendering. Be patient and take the time to measure!