I’m trying to attend the Hipbone Open studio figure drawing session as much as possible before we go on vacation. The only way I will be able to draw the figure in Europe is if my wife poses in our hotel room or if I do gestures of random people. I don’t like either idea so, I’ll be at the Hipbone open studio again tonight.
Slow Down!
The problem I have most of the time with my life drawings is that I go way too fast. For some reason the art world currently has a obsession with super fast renderings. Just look on Youtube, most of the videos are about “Speed sketch” or “Speed figure drawing“. And as much as I try not to, I get caught up in the hype. Of course it would be great to whip out an amazing and flawless sketch in minutes, but in reality most of us just end up going faster than we can and the resulting figure drawing is a mess.
So, my goal for the drawing tonight was to slow down and focus on accuracy. The more I thought about it the more it makes since. Honestly the only persons that will know that I completed the sketch in minutes will be the other artists at the open studio, or if I tell everyone reading this blog the time. But, what really matters is the end result.
As long as I don’t draw so slow that the figure looks stilted or dead then I’m fine with it taking three hours to get to this point. Mainly because I know that my drawings years from now will take me much less time because I’m going to be working my butt off until then.
Figure Drawing and Line Weight
As I was going through the figure drawing for a third time adding in some value and cleaning up lines I was also focusing on line weight. Line weight really makes the drawings looks nice when done correctly but there really isn’t any tried and true rules for how to do it. So tonight I was varying the line weight based on edge type. If the edge was lost the the line weight would be super thin, almost gone, if the edge was share I would make the line weight dark and a bit more bold.
Although, I didn’t think this was working well so, like always when I got home I researched the internet for some possible ideas and I found this great video all about line weight by Scott Robertson.
He goes through using atmospheric perspective to indicate line weight, plus varying line weight to indicate distance from viewer or the overlapping of objects. And it’s nice to see just some amazing drawings, their not figure related but there great all the same.
The full figure drawing
At a couple points during the open studio session I lost myself in the drawing. I was so into it that I was quite surprised when the model sat up for a break after 20 minutes, it only seemed like I was drawing for a couple minutes.
My warmup page
