Saturday, October 2, 2010

Life Drawing (Better Late than Never)

Figure drawing on Monday night again, I forgot to put this up here (it's over on WC)

I found these first two quick takes (3 minutes) the most interesting to do. While I was working on the quicker poses, it struck me that if if two tech goals are:
a) To be able to draw a subject w/o looking at the paper (as in blind contour drawing);
b) To be able to draw a subject with only occasional glances at the model while focusing on the drawing;
then putting these together:
Wouldn't it make sense to be able to draw a subject with only a few glances at the model AND the paper? Hmmmmm.....
So I gave it a try - stare at the model for a few seconds, place my charcoal on the paper, close my eyes, and start to draw, trying to collate my memory of the model with what I thought my hand was doing. As I moved from blocking in towards more detail, I had to open my eyes more in both directions. It's actually quite an intriguing feeling, very different than the more traditional approach of visually combining the subject and the drawing to (more or less) create a tracing. Not that I'm very good at that either, but I think these things help stretch the brain muscles!

Anyway, here are some of the (more passable) quick takes (22x34 compressed charcoal on newsprint):




Then the longer poses, both nupastel & conte on Kraft paper, 24x36: