At the figure drawing open studio tonight I attempted to put the Watts Atelier course to use, but the glaring lack of my drawing ability made it difficult to do anything. I think the largest issue I was having was wanting to move to fast. I’m so excited and want to hit each stroke perfectly with a flourish like Jeff Watts but my ability is just nowhere near his. So, by the last drawing I figured out that I need to move extremely slow through the figure.
My warmup, I’m really glad that the Watts Atelier has given me a purpose before class. Previously I would just sit and wonder what to do, but now, I do my warmup routine and work on focusing my mind.
First drawing, 45 minutes long. Here I was going somewhat slow and the drawing wasn’t too bad. The model was very thin, and I found it hard to figure out anything with the upper body. I kept wanting to have more knowledge of anatomy to help me through what I was seeing.
Here I’m going a bit faster in my drawing, this was 20 minutes and you can see that the speed is starting to cause issues.
Even faster now, and I’m getting frustrated. Looking back on this I see now that I was just going fast to try and push myself into great drawing too fast. I needed to slow it up, and let my hand, eye, and brain catch up with each other.
More frustration, as you can see I even made a note here to slow down.
Terrible…
I’m very frustrated at this point, luckily I had a 10 minute break to calm myself.
Finally, I figure out that I need to go slow. I added tone to this drawing while I was moving through the figure but I wish I didn’t. It tends to hide the glaring drawing issues. I’m still too attached with making a good finished drawing. At this point in my ability I should be working hard on getting the lay-in as accurate as possible along with clean lines, rather than worrying about the finished drawing.
