Sunday was a day of slow starts and slow progress.

Because of the morning lectures and the early Sunday closing of the cafeteria, we didn’t get to the photo shoot until after one in the afternoon. We spent about an hour fiddling with lighting and poses until I was happy with the reference shots.

Then I sat down to work. I figured I could just lay in the figures and draw my line art and be all set to begin with color this morning. My borrowed computer has other ideas. I guess I didn’t realize how much of a memory hog my technique is. When I purchased my iMAC I spent the $$ to install as much memory as the beast could hold. If I recall correctly that was 12 gig. This poor laptop only has 2. It just can’t handle my normal working style. So I had to find a work-around for that. In addition, my Wacom tablet is either not compatible with the PC system or after years of faithful service, needs to be put out to pasture (which is worse and what I really suspect.) I am having to redraw the same line over and over because the stylus is “hiccuping” and dropping the line for no apparent reason. My frustration level grew so much that by the end of last night I was ready to throw the whole contraption out the window conveniently located in front of me.

But, I persevered and continued working until I finally felt as if I made some progress. Obviously, with the above challenges there it is less likely that I will have a completed painting by the end of this week. I also miss, miss, miss my nice comfortable home set up where everything is the right height for me. One of the instructors joked about getting me a high chair or a telephone book. At this point if I had the option for either one of those, I think I’d grab it.

Today I will work at finishing the costuming and details on Tristan and Isolde. If I finish that, the only inking left will be the background details, which are more amorphous shapes and should go fairly quickly. Then tomorrow I can work on color and lighting studies and start blocking in values once I have that figured out.