Here's the results of Saturday afternoon in the studio, a grisaille:

In the next sitting, I'll be glazing color over this black and white underpainting.

Looking at it after some sleep, I'm not sure about the tooth cylinder dimensions -- it seems like maybe I should make the distance between the nose and the bottom of the jaw taller -- but then, there is that shadow on the jaw, which is making it look smaller than it really is. I also might take a fan brush to it, to smooth out the edges a bit and make it less choppy. Actually, I will do that, because I forgot to on Saturday.

In other news…

Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes! That cheered me up as I celebrated my birthday LA-style, by sitting in traffic (A grand total of six hours in the car, on Friday. Oof.). Amandarin took me to lunch at the Stinking Rose, which I'd never been to before, and must go back to very, very soon. Then I went to dinner with the man with two silver earrings and his wife, and then we saw Iron Man. My, Robert Downey Jr. has gotten more handsome with age. But in spite of his hotness, I still nodded off a couple of times during the film; that whole 2.5 hours of sleep the night before and six hours of driving was not a good combination.
The Art Cave's appliance insurrection continues: now it's the washing machine that won't pump water, and an outlet in the living room that refuses to power anything. Ah, the glamourous life I lead, I thought, as I was hand-washing loads of laundry last night, and then pitching them in the dryer.
I must hack through all the commissioned work I have to do, and all the homework. I'm getting to the point where avoiding my easel and drafting table, and instead scrubbing the floor seems like a very good idea. That's a bad sign.

It started raining just as I was leaving for work this morning, and I thought hard about calling in and staying home, in bed, listening to the rain and catching up on sleep. I drug myself in, though, and now am sorting through the small legion of things to be done this week.

But first, more coffee.

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