Dan Thompson, The Planar Head, Modeling The Nose in Clay

by Michela Mansuino

Level Three student

One of the most beautiful drawings of the nose, and something many artists aspire to, is that of Stephen Rogers Peck, from his "Atlas of Human Anatomy." After modeling this in clay and drawing it from life, I think about the nose in a very different way. I see it structurally in my mind's eye and see it organically in front of me. And, it's all thanks to our instructor, Dan Thompson.

To help us, Dan started with a giant nose. This has a straight mast in the center, representing the columella.

 

To this structure, then, two strips of clay are added, representing the wings of the nostrils - the alar. Dan uses toothpicks to hold it all in place.

 

Two more strips are added, representing the alar cartilage.

 

 

Four small cones are added, filling the negative spaces in between these strips.

 

Dan demonstrates the attachments one more time on his planar head. He starts by adding clay around the base of the nose like this:

 

 

He works the clay into place, making a platform on which the nose will be built.

 

On top of this shaped platform, Dan adds a slab of clay, a triangular wedge, which represents the "mast" of the nose, or the columella.

 

To the mast, then, Dan adds the two strips of clay that represent the wings of the nostrils.

 

Emanating from the tear duct, traveling down the length of the nose and tucking under the wings, are the two strips representing the alar cartilage. Notice how these strips start by twisting and then meet at the tip of the nose before they dive under the wings.

 

The negative spaces are then filled with four small cones.

 

This what my own planar head looked like when I attached the slab  representing the mast of the nose.

 

When I added the strips representing the wings and the alar or wing, I had attached them too low. See here how Dan corrected my attachment on the right, making the wing much higher in relation to the tip of the nose, where the alar meets in front and creates the "ball" of the nose.

 

I also started to attach the "sling of the muzzle. This is a thin strip of clay going on either side of the face, starting at the tear duct and wrapping around and under the jaw, making "the canopy of the jaw."

 

 

 

 Thanks to Dan Thompson, I know I see the nose much better now.

 

Tha Planar Head with Dan Thompson: The Ear as a Structural Door

by Michela Mansuino

Level Three student

The most underrated form on the head and one that gets far too little attention in most portraits is the human ear. It could be thought of as a door - with a beach ball holding it open. The concha (inner ear) being an immense, concave ball. In surer terms, the ear could be thought of as a rotated, extended panel on the lateral plane of the head.


We started our adventure into the modeling the human ear by rolling out two slabs of clay into rectangles approximately the size of what the nose should be. The slab should be a little thick, something you can remove clay from.

We lined the panels on our sculptures and attached them, lining them up with the cheekbone staple we had modeled the week before. We compared it to our skull.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once the panels were in place, we scooped out a bit in the center, like a giant sink, and gave it depth, then we added clay to the back. Here Dan demonstrates the depth of the "sink" in a giant ear.

In the back we added clay.

 

 

 

For the helix, we rolled out a big coil and kept it thick, but the coil also had a flat part. The coil then went around and dove into the concha, just as the Lincoln Tunnel dives into Manhattan.

 

 

 

Here I have the "doors" on my planar head in place and with the "sink" pushed in.

 

 

 

Here I have the coil of the helix in place and diving into the concha.

 

 

 

A diagram of how the shapes should be thought of conceptually.

 

 

 

The concept abstract.

 

 

 

The giant ear Dan built to demonstrate the concept.

 

 

 

Sculpting the forms from observation and focusing on depth. Here is Dan's planar head with the ear in place.

 

 

 

 

Notice how the tragus and antitragus are twin forms. The tragus is a form that could be thought of as two twisting cones according to Dan.

 

 

 

Here you can see the twisting cones of the tragus in an anatomy book.

 

 

 

 

From now on I will expect to see more refined ear and cheekbone shapes in the portraits I paint.

 

 

Nelson Shanks painted beautiful ears in his many portraits, like this one, which is extremely revealing for the subject. (Detail of the portrait of Pope Paul the II, by Nelson Shanks)

 

Look out for my next blog on the Planar Head on "The Nose"

 

The Planar Head with Dan Thompson

by Michela Mansuino
Third-year Student

It's 6:45 a.m. Wednesday and I'm radiantly happy as I climb out of bed realizing that Dan Thompson is probably, at this very minute, already driving down from New York to teach his now notoriously famous class at Studio Incamminati - THE PLANAR HEAD IN CLAY

 

I don't know how he does it, driving down to Philly, a three-hour trip, teaching for seven hours at Studio Incamminati, and then driving all the way back to New York - 13 hours of non stop energy... I find myself saying a prayer under my breath that he is okay as I drink my coffee and get ready to be the monitor for the class. 

 

We begin with a homemade armature and around 30 lbs. of Chavant Professional Plastelline.

 

 

 

For future heads, I make a detailed study of the Home Depot parts and other materials needed to make the armature.

 

We start by going to our armature and begin massing in clay, the “light bulb” shape, thinking about the carrying angle of the head and how the pole of the armature will be offset by it.

The size of the ball and egg shape is calculated to be a bit bigger than the skull we are working from, which is life size, so as to have room to make the planes a little exaggerated. We exaggerate them in order to learn from them.

                                                                   Our skull

 

 

Dan Thompson lectures on the mother planes of the head, following drawings by John H. Vanderpoel, in his book "The Human Figure."

 

 

From these Vanderpoel drawings, Dan instructs us where to make our first cuts on the mass of clay we have shaped on our armatures.

 

These diagrams are a decoded version of the planar head, step by step. This is where we start.

 

 

 

 

Dan models the mother planes in this manner:

 

 

 

Once we have accomplished this on our sculptures, Dan moves on to demonstrate the carving out of the tilt line - he uses a "dough cutter"  to make the cuts. He recalls where he found the thing, having thought it had looked like an amputation tool from the Civil War. If you see a painting of a nude in the background, that's Kathleen Moore's black and white form study from another class, hanging on the wall. We surround ourselves with our best work so that we may learn from each other.

 

Intermittently, between carving the planes of the planar head in clay, we draw and paint from the model. We have done two other exercises to further re-enforce our structural understanding  of the planar head.  These are:

1. Drawing the head two ways, side by side, one intuitively and the other structurally.

 

2). Painting the head two ways, side by side, one intuitively and the other structurally.

 

After a what seems to be five minutes, the day is over and I look forward to next Wednesday.  I'm worried Dan has a long trip home still. It's all going to be alright, so look for my blog on Dan Thompson next month for the continuation of the planar head in clay.  We will be carving and attaching the staple of the jaw that is the cheekbone, and the ear.

 

Yours Truly, Michela

 

For my blog on Studio Incamminati, I would like to continue with the subject of our still life drawing class, level one.  These pictures were taken at the end of our first semester, in December, 2013.

Here, our instructor, Katya Held, is giving us a group critique in front of the still life and at our easel.

Our still life set ups look very different depending on which angle they are seen from.  When we set them up, we make sure they look good from four or five different views.  We spend time adjusting the light, which is fixed to a boom on a sturdy light stand. 

We always start with a thumbnail sketch to block in the basic value relationships.  The thumbnail is kept simple, done in five values.  In this picture, you can see student Jason Jenkins continually comparing his thumbnail to his larger drawing and his larger drawing to the actual still life in front of him.

Student Jason Jenkins' drawing after two days.

From a slightly different angle, Anna Sang Justice’s drawing after two days.

Student Lyn Snyder's view and composition after two days.

From across the room, and a very different view of the still life, student Dale Longstreth's drawing after two days.

Our group had a still life life that was completely different, but it looked good from various angles.

One of the biggest decisions is whether the composition will look better vertical or horizontal.

I drew two thumbnails from this angle before I decided I wanted to compose it in a vertical format.

You can see from student Wendy Wagner Campbell’s drawing, that the still life was made up of many elements that were the same in range of values, with only two white and one black.

My favorite was this view of the set up that student Hope La Salle had.  Hope has kept her five values consistent throughout the drawing.

I’ll end here with a bit of writing by John Henry Fuseli (1741 - 1825) Swiss, on composition, because it  has everything to do with making pictures. 

“COMPOSITION, in its stricter sense, is the dresser of invention, it superintends the disposition of materials.  Composition has physical and moral elements: those are

     perspective - unity

     light - propriety

     shade - perspecuity

Without unity it cannot span its subject.

Without propriety it cannot tell the story.

Without perspecuity it clouds the fact with confusion, destitute of light and shade it misses the effect, and heedless of perspective it cannot find a place”  Fuseli

Update=Repainting the steps with another layer of paint and adding more detail.

In the process of finishing "Arches". Something I usually do at the beginning and end of the painting. I call it "threading". It is a superimposed grid which subdivides the rectangle in such a way as to make visible the eyes of the rectangle. Very useful and completely invisible albeit for in an architectural way. Juliette Aristides uses this method and you can read about it in her book "Classical Painting Atelier". I highly recommend her book.

I've recently started practicing the painting of roses.  They make a perfect subject for painting for obvious reasons, their color and their extravagant shape, but also for philosophical reasons as they remind us of purity and strength in the Christian religion.  The "Alla Prima" painting tecnique means that they will be painted in one session, even if that session is ten hours long, and it will all be painted wet into wet.  In painting wet into wet, it is impotant to add medium to the subsequent layers so the paint will flow overtop.

Here is a photograph of my still life set up.  I have chosen a deep forest green dropcloth for the background and a violet fabric for the table top.  The large roses are a light pink and are real.  The small flowers are plastic. I chose them to add variety to the shapes in the composition.  The light source is a spot light from above and to the left of the subject.  Notice the shadow on the right.  A large shadow mass can give unity to the design, allowing the viewer to read the picture from far away.

I'm starting with a toned panel measuring 18 X 22 inches.  A toned panel is a panel that I have painted a very thin layer or silvery gray acrylic paint over and left to dry for a couple of days.   I enjoy working on a toned panel because it allows me to know what middle tone gray is, and I can go darker and lighter.  It's like middle C on the piano.

The very first thing I do is a drawing of the composition. I do this with thinned out raw umber.  I thin out the paint with Gamsol, which is an oderless solvent.  I draw the big shapes with a # 12 flat hog's hair brush and wipe out the lights with a rag dipped in Gamsol. 

When I start adding color, I look at the color in the light, first.  I mix up a middle tone light of that color and put that in.  When I've put in all the different color in the light, then I look for the appropriate shadow color and  paint that last.  I try to improve the shapes as I go,  I keep my paint thin and try not to see too much detail by squinting my eyes.

The second time I go around at my color and find three very specific colors and their tones.  For the dark centers of the roses, I used pure permanent rose.  For the shadowiny side of the rose I mixed in the violet from the tablecloth and the forest green from the background.  For the middle tone lights in the rose I used pure persian rose.  For the petals in highlight, I mixed a lot of white and a bit of cadmium lemon into the persian rose.  I mixed oily medium into all of my paint at this stage to get it to flow over the paint that was already there.  I also switched from hog's hair bristle brushes to softer brushes, like ox hair, sable and synthetics.  The paint is quite thick in places.

This is ten hours of painting.  At this point it is completely "AIla Prima".  I could leave it like this or go over a few areas later, but ony when the paint will be completely dry, so as not to drag the tender surface layer down. 

About six months ago Mehri asked me to come take a look at a thick, beautiful frame that she had at her gallery at the frame shop.  She had an idea in her mind's eye that I could paint a Tuscan Landscape to go in that frame.  I agreed and then thought about all the places I had painted in San Gimignano and one place seemed like it would be right for this size rectangle and this kind of frame.  The rectangle measures 46 X 38 inches.

I had already painted one version of "Strada Bianca", started in 2007 and finished in 2010.  It was a quiet spot, no passers by except the occasional hunter.  I especially liked sitting next to a young but tall male cypress tree.

I went straight to my spot when I got to San Gimignano in July and observed the light at 7AM.  It was good.  Plenty of light and shadow.

I spent about two weeks going to my spot every morning at 7AM and working till 10AM.

And something felt wrong.  The heat was unbearable, hitting what felt like 100 degrees by 9 AM.  And there was nothing spectacular about the light, either.  I resolved to go earlier, much earlier, even in the dark before the sun would come up and look at this landscape in a new light and during a cooler moment.

And that was really kind of frightening.  I've never painted a sunrise or a sunset because my teacher had told me not to do it becasue it was such a cliche´.  But I tried to imagine what a sunrise would look like in the painting by doing a photoshop version of it.

So this was on my mind and when I got out there, in the dark, that I should not attempt a sunrise, that I would ruin a good painting... And there were patches of flatened grass where wild boars had slept and I was terrified one was still around, I thought I could smell them.  But I set up my umbrella, easel, and put out my paints and waited for the sun to come up.

It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.  Maybe the sun does this every morning?  That morning the sun really put on a show for me and I was painting and taking pictures so quickly I got paint all over my camera.... the whole thing took less than seven minutes and then it was gone, over!

I worked on this painting on site for eight weeks from 5:30 to 9:30AM. The sun moved a lot.  I found out how hard it was to see the shapes in the cypress tree bark on the left and I tried very hard to envelope the hills in the early morning atmosphere so typical of Tuscany.  And I felt a divine connection to religious paintings of the seventeenth century and tried to put that in it, too.

But here I am now, six months later and painting from the several pictures I took while painting en plein air.  I could not have made up this sunrise, I needed the pictures.  I could not only paint from the pictures, I needed to be there eight weeks.

Layers of color on top of color and glazes will be bright enough to describe the light coming directly from the sun.  Each layer has to dry and then another painted agian, on top. Some how working from light to subsequently darker layers is turning out to be right.  Normally one works from darker to light in oils. 

For me it is not enough for a painting to look like the place where I painted it.  It has to have drama... 

Studio Incamminati is a drawing and painting academy located in Philadelphia.  Its founder, Nelson Shanks, is one of the greatest living portrait painters in America.  Under his supervision and tutelage, hundreds of very fortunate students have studied and are studying the principles of classical atelier fine art.

November 5 - 11 one of these instructors came to the Great Falls School of Art to conduct a professional developement workshop for intermediate and advanced level painters in fine arts. I was very fortunate to be able to attend the workshop along with seven other artists from the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Area.

I have posted here a progression of my sustained study of the female nude from the very first drawing, the closed grisaille, to the full color finished oil painting.  The painting measures 16 X 20 inches. These developements took three days, seven hours a day.  

From these pictures you can see the classical developement of the image from the monochrome drawing in oil, on canvas, to the first, second and third passes of color, each nearing more the natural appearance of the skin tones surrounded by light and colored drapery.

Studio Incamminati is a drawing and painting academy located in Philadelphia.  Its founder, Nelson Shanks, is one of the greatest living portrait painters in America.  Under his supervision and tutelage, hundreds of very fortunate students have studied and are studying the principles of classical atelier fine art.

November 5 - 11 one of these instructors came to the Great Falls School of Art to conduct a professional developement workshop for intermediate and advanced level painters in fine arts. I was very fortunate to be able to attend the workshop along with seven other artists from the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Area.

I have posted here a progression of my sustained study of the female nude from the very first drawing, the closed grisaille, to the full color finished oil painting.  The painting measures 16 X 20 inches. These developements took three days, seven hours a day.  

From these pictures you can see the classical developement of the image from the monochrome drawing in oil, on canvas, to the first, second and third passes of color, each nearing more the natural appearance of the skin tones surrounded by light and colored drapery.

This summer in San Gimignano, Siena, Italy, I chose a motif that I had painted a few years ago. These three particular rolling hills are typical for this part of Tuscany, with a mix of forest, vineyards, cypresses and mountains.  I was looking for curves in the composition and I liked this particular spot because of the cypress tree to the left.  I had started painting in that spot in the morning around 8 AM and probably workied on it for four days before I realized that the light was not moody enough for me.  I then started going out at 5:30 AM and that, my friend, is when the magic started happening.  At that magic hour when the sun purs forth from behind the mountains, the whole world turns an orangy pink, but so saturated that all the colors seem to become a soup of warm glowing beauty.  In the weeks to follow, the sun always came up a deep fuscia color.  I couldn't paint it that color, however, in this painting, because it would dominate the entire composition, I think.  I chose to keep the sunrise a soft orange blury-ness, with the clouds dancing around it.  The canvas is now rolled up, ready to be transported on the airplane back home to Virginia.  I'll restretch it there.  It will go on display at The Hermitage Gallery of Art, McLean, Va., in October.

The finished "Brother's" portrait.  The stellar personalities of these two boys inspired me the whole way through this painting.  I couldn't put it down and I couldn't wait to work on it every day.  I think the high keyed color communicates their youth and I think the casual style of their clothing is appropriate for an oil sketch. Even though they did not pose this way for the photogragraph, and I composed this from nearly 100 pictures, they look comfortable here in their portrait.

The younger brother with details in the eyes, nose and mouth.

Here the "Brother's" portrait is almost finished.  Beyond this stage I'll spend a whole day just painting the eyes and adding a few finishing touches.  Look for the differences, especially in the lights, the highlights and the highlight accents.

I had wanted to finish the portrait "Alla Prima", in one layer.  But two heads are more complex than one, and I decided to keep adding layers instead,daily, in a wet over dry process.  In this layer, I 've reconstructed the older boy's head from the form of the skull to the last details of highlight and highlight accent.  I chose a better color for the polo shirt, a color called Aureoline.  The paint is thick.  It is very clear now that one head is "ahead" of the other in terms of developement.

Just like I blocked in the shirts, I blocked in the portrait pinks, starting with the shadows and then the middle tone lights.

Going into color, I had some ideas about how I wanted the finished portrait to look.  Blue background, pink and hay colored polo shirts and orangy pinkinsh skin.  I blocked in the colors all around the faces first.

Step four of the open grisaille is dedicated to those few specks of darkest darks that make it easy to read the picture.  I especially like to mark the pupils as the darkest darks.  It is important here to leave the white canvas where form is revealed in the light.  The clean white canvas is an absorbant foundation for the paint layers that will be added thickly and deliberately in the alla prima portrait.

Step three of the open grisaille would best be called the block-in.  Form is revealed through the light and shadowed areas in the drawing.  The values are kept as close as possible here in order to save the very darkest darks untill the end.

Step two of the open grisaille involves chiseling away at the features, describing the form of the skull with a slightly darker gray, defining the collar of the shirt to expose the gesture of the neck.

The first step to the "Alla Prima Portrait" is composing within the square in a way that the two boys will fit together in the right scale for the canvas, which is 18 X 18 inches.  Here I've started drawing the envelope of their heads in a light gray with a #12 Filbert.

____________________________________________________________________________________

What's on my easel today? The finished study for "Brothers". Although I can't wait to start painting it in full color in oils on canvas, I actually want to draw this again.  I will draw it with a brush, on the canvas, in three tones, called the grisaille.

What's on my easel today?  Two gorgeous faces that I get to paint!  The double portrait is indeed fascinating because of the resemblance between the two siblings and the dynamics of their fondness for each other.  These two boys are ages 3 and 6.  I took 100 photos of them together and selected two that were the best to work from because yes, they were very excited about the photo shoot and yes, they were squirming around like healthy little kids do.  So after three photoshop color renderings I starting practicing their faces in charcoal today.

It was right after the Cherry Blossoms last Spring that I decided to to keep going back to this loction to paint at the Tidal Basin.  The Jefferson Monument was nearly portrait pink every glorious day last year and I was compelled to record it.  But it got terribly green.  The very first green of Spring isn't green at all, but an orangy pinkish yellow.  But that lasted only a few days and then it was terribly green.  I painted it anyway and after a month all the cherries were out, suprise!  There were lots of things happening all around me, the throngs of high school kids from all over the country and this bird.  This bird was tending a nest down inside the tree.  This bird was always there.  So, I painted the bird.  It was truly rewarding when a huge baby bird came out of that hole one day and I was right there to see it.  That's what I like about painting in the same spot day after day.

But of course, the painting was too green.

So,this year I took that painting out and sanded down all the green leaves and painted the cherry blossoms in!  

This is what my painting looked like after I took it to the Tidal Basin to paint the blossoms in. 

There were a few passages that I felt I could finish better in the studio.  The reflection in the water, for example, was photographed by me on the very day there was no wind.  The water was almost still and the ripples were slow, creating a soft distortion.  I used a paint that was cut with 50% of medium, to get the "wet" look of the water.  There were other passages, in the fullest places of the flowering blossoms, that I rendered from my photograph as well.

I've always wanted to paint portraits with lively brushstrokes and full rich color.  Recently I took a workshop with Robert Liberace and practiced the three and four hour "Painterly Portrait".  I did three portraits in this workshop.  The first one was the most difficult because I was still in cherry blossom painting mode!  Here is my first three hour painterly portrait of Steve.  oil on canvas, 20 X 16 inches.

Day two was quite successful as I rose to the occasion!  I had a little more time, four hours, and I spent the first hour starting ten ten times, but I got a nice grisaille on my tenth time....

I spent the next three hours painting in full color!  Here is my finished four hour portrait of Domenique.  oil on canvas, 18 X 24 inches.

On the third day I got an almost profile view of Steve.  There were a lot of people in the room, 23 in all, and we shared the best views by rotating to a different spot each day.  I rather really like frontal views but this is the view I got the last day and I tried to make the best of it.  Here is my four hour painterly portrait of Steve.  oil on canvas, 20 X 16 inches.

This is what my painting looked like after day 05.

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