After a long holiday with lots of excitement and guests, it felt good today to go to the watercolor gallery and paint for a morning. My plan for the year is to use these practice sessions to become more confident with technique. For now, I want to do more painting without pencil lines and to make expressive marks with a single sweep of my brush. This sketch was my most successful this morning, perhaps because I left quite a bit of the black paper unpainted.

So much of live painting depends on how the model shows her mood through her body language. I thought that the model today seemed to be in a hard place emotionally and that it showed in this particular pose in the way she held her head with her hand, which in turn was supported by her arm and knee. The oversized hand was a happy accident, and it seems to signify to me that she has the strength to move beyond present problems.