Life drawing on halloween wasn’t as festive as I would have hoped at the open studio. It was the same setup of poses as always without any cool costumes but at least I was drawing.
I’m not sure that a model setup in costume would have worked for shorter drawings but it would have been interesting to try something new. Over at Jana Bouc’s life drawing studio they did a long pose and the model dressed up as a pirate complete with a weapon and even sea shanty music. Now that would have been fun!
As usual, my warmup page. I can’t stress enough how important these are. I’m always a bit frazzled when getting into the studio. The traffic here sucks and the warmup page gives me time to get my head in place and the muscles in my arm ready to work.
I will say it agin, I need to work more on my gesture drawings…
Here I wasn’t worried about getting the whole figure on the page, I just wanted to be as accurate as possible with what lines I did put down in 5 minutes.
The first of the 5 minute poses here went really well (the one of the left). But the second on didn’t go well at all. I have been noticing that when the model is facing me or I get at least a 3/4 view of the face the rest of the pose doesn’t go well. I’m thinking this is because I’m not comfortable with portraits at all and beginning with the head and face always sets the start of the pose off some how. Again, I need to work on portrait drawing so I can get better at this. If I’m correct, drawing the portrait well will help me draw the whole figure well.
Ok this was sort of like a costume. The model already had the boots on and the studio provided the hat quickly. It was a good pose, I was looking up at the model but I wasn’t able to clearly show the angle well.
Here I am again doing a better drawing when the model is faced away from me. It’s as if when I don’t have to work on the portrait I’m able to keep myself calm and work through the figure slowly. But add in a face and right away I’m frazzled.
The last pose of the night went really well. I know it doesn’t look like much but the idea was to focus on right angles and getting the proportion as perfect as possible. If I could start every figure drawing this well then most would end up looking amazing. In many cases I have found that a good start on a figure drawing is paramount and integral to the success of the drawing.
But there was one issue here, I cut her feet off. Another skill I need to master is placing the figure well on the page at the beginning of the drawing. I have always had a hard time drawing an area then fitting the figure within it. It isn’t hard enough that I need to get all the proportions correct, now I need to get them correct while remaining in a limited space.