WOW...it has been a little more than 35 hours since my last post, it feels as if only a few minutes have passed. We are in full swing down at the pod so much so that I accidentally left my camera behind, so no pics tonight, apologies... but I am loving it. All the artists are really friendly and helpful. I am the only artist attending who is currently living in the Kansas City area, everyone else is from afar. Diego made it in from Guadalajara, Mexico and another artist is in from Nova Scotia, Canada. I will have to apologize because her name escapes me at the moment. Because everyone is from all over, not everybody has a car here, the students with wheels have been very gracious by hooking us up with rides to and from the pod. So thanks to everyone with a car for being so generous.

We spent all day Monday shooting reference for our first piece, several went down to the River Market for lunch and reference shooting. It was a hot day, and not much was open being that it was Memorial Day. Everyone found something to eat though and it was back to the pod to start analyzing reference and thumbnail sketching.

I got home just after 11:30pm and continued to sketch out ideas for another hour and then hit the sack for a few hours of rest.

Tuesday was a blur. We arrived at the pod just at 9:15 and hit the ground running. a quick talk from John and Brent, while the group continued to break down reference images into simple value and shape sketches. We did a quick critique and got back to work, further developing the best of our ideas into a slightly more refined image, still focusing on simplicity.

After lunch we watched a Gary Kelly video demo on taking our images even further into the process and ways to manipulate the picture to get it to read the way you need or want it to. It was really cool to see him do it on the video, but I am looking forward to seeing him do more of the same type of stuff in person next week.

Tuesdays and Thursdays from 7-9 is figure drawing. Tonight we had a beautiful model and Mark English demoed his technique for simplifying the human form. It is a great way to draw, and helps you see the forms and shapes that are created as light wraps around the body. I wish the students would have been able to draw more tonight though. I was looking forward to it all day and we only got 3 poses in. Hopefully Thursday will be the full two hours with some warm-up gestures to loosen us up a bit.

We stuck around for a little while longer, but I was beat and was able to catch a ride with my new friend Steve. I was hoping to grab a full eight hours of shut eye tonight, but since I wanted to post it is going to be more like six hours. So with that...I will go rest and look forward to a bright new day tomorrow, or I guess today!

Cheers!