Day 4 - applying learnings & nice conversations

Good morning love birds,

I send you greetings from the wonderful world of Florence. I am super excited because tonight we will see the inside of the dome and cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore, or short THE DUOMO!! This building you might have seen on many of my photos, stories and videos on Instagram (@siriberlin_drawings). I am in love with it. When we arrived I could not take my eyes off it. Arriving in Florence is already a stimulus over load. Seeing this amazing cathedral build in the 15th century in real life does not do any of its depiction any justice. So today is the day. We will see. I might eat it or marry it. Such a delicious piece of art.

Back to studio life. I get more and more used to getting up early and making my way to the studio. And even though we have fixed "office hours" I am looking forward to go there every day. No thought anymore on skipping a day. ( I will leave early today, though. Because: Doumo!). Our little class consists out of 6 students. And as promised on the Angel Academy homepage, people are coming from all kinds of backgrounds. There is M., a middle-aged guy from Costa Rica, MK a medical illustrator from Minnesota, A., an 18 year old girl from Oxford, V an eager student from Bulgaria and Vin, a friendly person from Brazil, living in Kentucky. It is interesting what you learn about people while painting with them. You know and besides that school ethics are very high, no one wants to leave after 5pm or really take a break. I still do. Because the body needs it.

Yesterday we started on our second head - as you can see in the pictures. This time a more female presenting head. And we go through the same stages as last time. Fascinating, how much I already learned in the first three days. drawing "ghosty lines" as Jared calls them, plumb lines and others, I feel it really helps me to gain the shape quicker, to look more closely, because I have more reference points. And then I became impatient (a very new thing to me , hehe). I wanted to go further and do the next step. But this is not something one does in this class. Because you never know what eagle eye Jared comes up with and whether you will have to render even more afterwards. So I had a break and a nice chat with A. as well as a very informative talk with a guy from the first year R.

R is from the US and he did the portrait class in January. He showed me his results. Now I know what stuff I will be doing the next weeks. I am so excited. So after drawing heads 2 and 3 we will do a study of a Renaissance Painting and then move to a photo. Yes, no life model. But I get to do 3 sessions of 3 hours in the next weeks due to extra sessions with a model as I told you yesterday.

R. also said that one can stretch the 3-year Diploma class over 10 years if one likes. Meaning: one can book a trimester (4000€) and then come back whenever. The schedule is quite consistent. So one knows upfront what work one is going to do. Just saying in case you are interested. We also talked about the soul of the painting. The spiritual side. The emotion you get from it. This is not a technique. This is the magic of art.

I need to run now, guys.

More tomorrow. I hope I have time to write a little longer report on the weekend. Because Florence. And wine.

Love you, Siri

Learnings in short

- "ghosty lines" (plumb lines and such) help a lot with establishing the right form and shape by giving more reference - all stages of the process serve to render the painting more to reality - taking breaks can be very informative.