Summer Art Experiment #4 (and the story behind it)

A little over a month ago, Michael and I went to an outdoor concert that featured Spanish guitarists and a flamenco dancer. During the concert, a little girl (about three, I think) was mesmerized by the dancer and kept creeping close to her and imitating her movements.

I was very taken by the scenario, so much so that I wrote a poem about it and published it here on the blog.

Still, I couldn't get it out of my mind. I kept seeing an image of how I might paint the scene. I don't have the skill yet to do it justice (it deserves to be an oil painting, and I haven't even started oils). But I didn't want to lose the idea, so I decided to make a sketch.

Of course, I don't have models, so I had to work from photos: a stage from one, a pair of dancer's legs from another, a skirt from a third, a little girl sucking her thumb from a fourth, with an upraised arm from an entirely different photo. You get the idea.

Here is the resulting sketch. It's just a working study, and it's not quite right because of the way I had to do it. Ideally, I want the girl turned a bit more to her left and her eyes upraised to the dancer. But this is good enough to capture my idea until I'm able to paint it. If I ever do paint it, I'll have to use models to get all the angles and proportions right. But this will do for now.