figure drawing

Now, don't get all giggly. This is serious stuff. Last night I drew a nude model for the first time in my life. 20 years ago, in this very same classroom, we were supposed to have a nude model, but for some reason or another she was always in a leotard. That's probably for the better. I was young and self conscious and probably would have fallen out in nervous laughter. Now? I'm too old for that silliness. And besides, after about five minutes you don't even notice it anymore as you are so intent on your drawing. The model just becomes another still life.
First we did several warm up exercises where the model would pose for about 30 seconds and we would quickly do some gesture drawing, which is just a few lines to get the position of her body, then some squiggle drawings (not sure if that's the technical term) where you are drawing her mass with a squiggle that looks like a slinky. Then, we had about a minute or two to do some blind contour drawing. I just love (not really) this last exercise.  It's just as it sounds. You are standing off to the side of the easel, and without looking at the drawing paper your eyes slowly follow the contour of the model as your drawing hand moves in unison on the paper. You finish with some rather picassoesque shapes with that one.

Finally, we did about a 5 or 10 minute sketch as seen in the first picture above and then onto an hour [30 minutes, then a break for the model, and then another 30 minutes] sketch seen in the second picture.

If you hadn't already noticed, I'm a bit leery of drawing hands and feet. I never liked it before and I still don't like it now, but don't worry, I'll be working on that in the future. I'd hate for her to have mitten hands and feet forever.

Oh, and I'm pretty certain our model's identity is safely hidden by my drawing skills. Now, maybe when I get to drawing III that will become a concern.

self portrait II

Yesterday we did another self portrait (No, I didn't get a haircut. My hair was up in a clip).

This time we used the reductive process. Using an x-acto knife or scissors, we scraped charcoal onto the surface of the paper and spread it around with a cloth. Then, we used an eraser to create the highlighted areas of our face and went back in with charcoal for the shadows and white conte crayon to add back the brightest highlights. It's harder to get as much detail this way, but I really enjoyed the process.

The bottom right grayish area is what the charcoal first looks like when you spread it on. I really like the eraser marks all around the outline of my head. It looks like an etching. Well, I guess it is etching in a way.

self portrait

No, this is definitely not the skeleton picture I was supposed to post Friday. That crappy cell phone picture really came out bad, so you'll just have to look at my crappy cell phone picture of a self portrait for now.

Those of you that don't know me will just have to trust me when I say that everyone in class said it looks just like me. And it's probably pretty fitting for Halloween right now with that scary look on my face. ;)

No Bones About It

We had to draw this young lady last night. I will post my feeble attempt later tonight.

If anyone noticed, I haven't posted a drawing in a while. The last few classes were all about 1 point and 2 point perspective, vanishing points, horizon lines, etc. Pretty cool stuff that I remember from 20 years ago. It is relatively easy stuff. Then, Tuesday night we had to draw several boxes on a table. Of course, you can't use the perspective you learned, because your vanishing points would be way off the page, so you basically have to wing it. Who knew drawing boxes would be so difficult? You draw a bottle and no one really notices right away if it's off a little, but with a box, it's instantly apparent when something's not right. It was a frustrating night.  At least it was for me. So far that was my least favorite day in class.

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Foo's random curiosities: Why is it that we call it Northern Virginia and they call it Upstate New York? Upstate Virginia? Northern New York? Doesn't sound right, does it?