I wanted to try and accomplish a lot today and I figured it would help the art time pass tonight if I did a daily art mix of medium and subject. I ended up working in charcoal and oil while also spending some time on gestures, portrait, figure and still life painting.
I’m not totally sure if the limited time in each subject has done me any good but I do know that this made the time pass by really fast.
My warmup page in charcoal, always great to do before I start any charcoal drawing.
I’ve said over my past few posts that i needed to work on gesture drawings so here they are. I worked from reference photos on my iPad. It’s not as great as a live model but who can afford that. Because of the short time in these sessions I may focus on just one or a few poses and really work on how to see the gesture in each pose.
Next up, I’m onto a portrait. Wow is suck at this. I mean if I worked on this drawing for an hour I could have turned it into something but for only 15 minutes I had a really hard time getting even the basic shapes down. So next time, I’m going to dial it down a bit and instead of trying to get a full portrait done I will focus on just getting the head shape correct, I may not even get to the features.
This is my regular setup when working from my iPad.
Here again, 15 minutes is not near enough time to get a full figure done and rendered but I should at least have a block in of the figure done and accurately placed. I feel that I’m not too far off. My focus was not only on proportion of the block in but also placement on the page. I marked off a section on the page and measured with head lengths to try and get the figure placed within the space.
The iPad setup for the quick figure drawing.
Now I’m back to my simple shapes still life. I had already drawn out the still life on the canvas and figured out the values. All I needed to do was refine and add color.
The focus here was on simplifying the shapes and planes. I was having a hard time at this point working calmly and purposefully. Most of the time when I work I feel like I’m in the “zone” and I have absolute focus on what I’m doing while working slowly. This state of mind usually produces the best work. But every now and then I loose that focus and work at a hurried pace making too many bad decisions and similar to this session the piece turns out badly.
Not a bad still life, but I’m not so interested in it anymore. I think I will move on to another subject tomorrow, one that I may have more interest in. I may even repeat the same subject for several days, I’m not sure.
