After doing an hour long drawing focusing on the details and doing a lot of shading I realized I wasn’t learning much.
After work I started artwork with a focus on utilizing gesture to setup a figure drawing. It was my intention to do the gesture as accurate as possible then refine the structure and finally separate the shadows from the lights. What I ended up doing was an hour long drawing of lots of subtle shading. The final drawing didn’t turn out good at all because it was too small and I hadn’t finished refining the structure of the whole figure. It’s cool that I got carried away with this though because I learned something. Shading isn’t teaching me anything.
I feel I could learn so much more just by setting up the figure accurately within 20 minutes. So, I did some more drawing later in the day from the YouTube channel Draw This. Every Friday they put on a figure drawing session that lasts about 2 hours. It starts with a bunch of 1 minutes poses, then 5 minute, then 10 and 15. My focus throughout this whole session was to work accurately, not fast, I wasn’t rushing and trying to get the whole figure done in 1 minute. But I tried to ignore the details and just put down the basic structure accurately while at the same time keeping the gesture. Good news is that I think I’m getting better at it.
