Blood Draw part 2

 

Well, no doctor appointments today.  No federal holiday.  Just hot.  A good day to get up to the Studio and do some work.  Actually the heat was part of it.  I know from experience that the basement gets damp and warm as the summer goes on, and it was as good a day as any to bring this up to the new person in charge. The upper floors, which also get very hot in summer in that historic building with no air conditioners, can install air conditioners in the windows, and the building will do that.  In the basement they can't, so we get some dehumidifiers, which do a good job, but none are out right now.  When I arrived, I checked.  Actually, the basement isn't too bad yet, but I know what will happen as the summer goes on.

So after dropping off my stuff, and picking up the block and print from my last piece (done at the Open Studio) I dropped by the office.  Elyse wasn't in (on vacation this week I am told), so I couldn't ask about the dehumidifiers yet, though Kaitlyn, who has been around a few years, knew exactly what I was talking about, so maybe it will get done without any more from me.  The print and the block were to show her, since she mentioned she had been trying relief printing of late.  She was impressed with the block (and the speed in which I got it done) and the print, with its dark black and clearly printed shapes and ink.  I told her that it was an oil based ink (Outlaw Black I believe), which she had already recognized, probably because that's what I told her to use last week.  She hasn't done that yet, but told me she did follow my advice and use something harder to print the linoleum and had better results than she had with a barren.  She wondered if it still wasn't right because she was using mounted (on fiberboard) linoleum instead of loose sheets, but I told her I've used both, and found no difference when it comes to printing.  Oil based ink, on the other hand, gives a much darker black, and stays wet for days, not the minutes you get with water based inks.  She may also invest in some better paper.  Meanwhile, she recognized the scenes from the basement and appreciated the idea when I told it to her.

Time to get to work.  I had the block ready to go.  For music I had seen I still had my Jazz/Blues set in my bag, so I went with some from that.  I started with the soundtrack from the David Cronenberg's film The Naked Lunch, which was a very strange film (only loosely based on what is reputed to be an even stranger novel) but the odd combination of the London Philharmonic and Ornette Coleman's saxophone playing worked very well as an appropriate way to accompany the hallucinatory nature of the film.  You can read more about it on this blog in June, 2019.  I followed that with fellow sax player John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, which seemed to be the only thing I had that made sense with the other album, and not a bad listen in itself.  Much to my surprise, this didn't get written about until March of this year.

As I said previously, I would prefer a live model to act as the nurse, but I figured either way, the first step was to draw myself, in pencil.  I did a quick thumbnail of what I had in mind for the composition, and then set about trying to draw such a thing.  

How do you get a side profile of a face?  My solution was two mirrors, looking into a hand held one at another mirror on my table that was actually reflecting my face from an appropriate angle.   Good enough for this roughed in sketch, which I will fix up later.  Both arms are actually the same arm, my left, once drawn as I looked at it in a mirror, once drawn right in front of me.  That far one in this early sketch needs a lot of work, especially that thumb, but this is all pencil, so it can and will be fixed.  An extremely rough version of the nurse is there,  just to tell me where she will go.  My plan is to finish all this in pencil, then darken the borders with drawing ink, and leave everything else until I put in the other figure.  I may have to erase some of what I will have drawn to put her in.  But it's a start.