Get ready for some really bad drawings. Tonight at life drawing I was not focusing on making good looking drawings but I was struggling with form in space. Basically I was trying to build up the body structurally and use techniques to show its dimensionality.
I didn’t get much done with these gestures at all. I was trying to see the gesture, get proportions correct, describe the body with minimal strokes and try and give an understanding of volume all at the same time. Currently this is too much for me to handle in under 2 minutes.
Five minute poses didn’t help much either. I was confused on how to describe the volume of even the larger masses of the models body in 5 minutes. What resulted was just a lot of random lines. At this point I was getting a little frustrated and internally there was a battle going on with learning how to do this or making a good drawing.
For this pose I focused on making a better drawing and didn’t worry about the volume. I feel like I ran from a problem though…
Here I’m only looking at the torso and for 15 minutes I was trying to think of ways to show the roundness of the torso and how it moves through space. I didn’t come up with much even in 15 minutes.
This was a costumed pose so focus on the body was not possible so I focused on the head and was trying desperately to build the face in a structural manner and show its volume and transitions in space. A profile pose is not the best for this, it would have been easier on me if I got a 3/4 pose of the head.
For this one I tried a different tactic. I got the contour laid out and used value to describe the form but the most important part was that when I laid down the value I did it with the form. Kinda like a sculptor would run a tool over the surface of a shape. This worked really well but I still think that I could look closer at artists like George Bridgman and how he describes volumes with just line.
This one didn’t work so well, I needed to keep the values lighter and not commit so darkly, it ended up flattening out the forms too much.