Burlesque Dancer

Deidre, a member of a burlesque troupe that performs on the cabaret stage at The Lodge in Santa Fe, posed for the Tuesday evening drawing group at Argos Gallery. Although it wasn't really apparent, she's pregnant. So the plan is to have her pose at least once every month for the next half-dozen months, to create a sketchbook record of her pregnancy.

Two-minute warm up drawings.

Keeping it simple. And quick.

The "simple and quick" drawing gave me time to do a second drawing of the same pose, this time focusing on the upper body and head.

I think she should duplicate this pose every month, to really show the change her body goes through. I'll plan to montage the drawings into one image. Of course, the final effect will depend on how good or bad the drawings might be.

A different style for this pose.

While Waiting...

While waiting for the regular Tuesday sketch evening to get here, I've been experimenting with existing sketches in Corel Painter and Photoshop.

Starting with an iPhone photo of a page from the sketchbook, I enlarged the image in Photoshop (30 x 40 inches), then altered the color of the paper texture that appeared in the original photo. I opened the image in Corel Painter, used an oil brush clone tool to selectively clone the main lines and some of the background around the drawing. Back in Photoshop I duplicated the image to a new layer, applied a poster edges filter to accentuate the line work, then reduced the opacity of the new layer to 75% and set the new layer's blend mode to Overlay. 

Image detail. Click to enlarge and see the subtle effect of the Painter clone brush strokes and poster edges filter.