belly-dancing. really.

let's see if i am coordinated enough to be able to type a blog entry in anglais while listening to serge gainsbourg on mon ipod en francais (he is SO WEIRD - 'le cadavre exquis"?? wot the hell). um. so we did two more poster studies today, and it is really hard to keep the colour blocks separate and force yourself to really think about exactly how much light each planar surface is actually getting relative to all the other ones. it is also astonishing how much time it all takes - you spend an entire afternoon trying to paint a 5x7" blobby preparatory study that you will never actually paint a proper picture for. no end product except for a nebulous and at this stage purely theoretical increase in skill. today the model had a bright red cloth hanging up behind her for a backdrop, which reflected off her skin with a slight deep pink glow, and the challenge was to paint her so that she did not look like a raspberry popsicle. no comment on whether i was successful :)
after class, one of the students who has been here since the summer term (there's a group of five who stayed on; most of them have in fact spent several terms here), gave me & the model a belly-dancing lesson. she learned from one of the prior students who was a professional belly-dancing teacher, and got totally obsessed. all her laptop bookmarks are bellydancing performances, and she ordered a bunch of fun jingly things from paris. we spent a hilarious hour shimmying around her room in bras, long skirts, gauzy scarves, and bare feet - it's a good workout, that's fo sho. my arms felt like they were they going to fall off by the end of the lesson, and it's equivalent to about five hundred situps. apparently a bunch of them gave an actual performance at the end of the summer term, and she and another of the multi-repeat students gave us a mini-performance at the end of the lesson, to give us something to aspire to. it was great. the model is going to give us a hula class tomorrow night. i may not learn to paint, but gosh darn it i will have beautifully toned abdominal muscles by the time i come home.
i also finished my drawing copy of the ann boleyn painting and am just irrationally pleased with it. hopefully it mean the painting copy will go well. i wonder if you drew the exact same thing a gajillion times whether you would get to the point of being able to draw it exactly accurately from memory. hmm. not going to try.
hope all are well....