Mike Tuesday Night Study
To become a better musician, one should practice their scales; for an artist it is "brush miles", and even working from a different type of subject in a different medium still polishes your eye-hand coordination painting skills. Part of my journey to become a better artist finds me painting portrait studies from a live model for three hours every Tuesday evening in Petaluma, California, and Thursday evenings sketching and drawing from a live model at the same studio. You might ask "Why not just work from a photo, after all, they sit still?" Working from life teaches you not only to get the shadows and the lighting right, and to avoid the "flat" appearance of something painted from a photograph, but somehow to capture the feeling you have as an artist, interacting with the object, scene, or person, getting the emotion and personality of the subject. You also learn to make quick judgement calls, using your talent to capture fleeting glances. Even when I'm working in the studio on a large landscape, I'm usually working from a smaller plein air painting that brings the real sense of place back to the creation. If you don't "feel" something when you're looking at one of my works on the wall, I failed.
