I consider myself to be extremely fortunate because I love my job. Not many people can say that and many people don’t have the freedom of working form home like I do. So, when my art marathon day was postponed due to a huge issue at work I feel disappointed, but then I look at how fortunate I am, shrug, and plan it for another day.
The plan was to spend the whole day drawing and painting. I started out the day by going to my local life drawing open studio in Portland. Now that I think about it, postponing the art marathon day may have been better because the drawings today were not going well at all.
I was planning on doing a bunch of gestures as part of the art marathon, I really need to work on these as I get so confused when I’m facing a live model, I have no plan of attack at all.
This is one of those days of drawing where it seems like every mark I make lands in the wrong place. The struggle was starting and I couldn’t seem to shake the lack of focus. I think internally I was battling myself for accuracy and trying to finish a full figure.
These drawings are better. You can see how the model has great muscle definition in her arms. I was thinking the whole time that she must be a gymnast, you don’t get triceps that huge without doing some kind of exercise. From the looks of her arms I’m sure she could hold her own weight easily.
Here I’m trying to slow down and work on getting her facial features correct. I ended up spending way too much time on her face. I couldn’t get anything correct it seems and I was resorting to value to cover up mistakes. Another thing I need to work on is portraits and heads.
Here I sort of gave up. I thought if I was going to make a bad drawing, then let it happen but do it with confidence. I think this extra bit of confidence allowed me to make some better decisions and move through the drawing quickly. Sure there are lots of issues here, but if it was a longer drawing I could see correcting them easily.
Here is where the art marathon day ended. Luckily I was well into the last pose of the morning before I got the call from work. If you have ever gotten a call in life drawing open studio you know how disrupting it is. So, I quietly packed up my materials and headed home.
