More from life

All 15 minute poses this week. I remain frustrated with the quantity of information I am able to record in the time available, specifically with respect to light and shadow. If we moved to 30 minute poses I might be able to more clearly indicate form, finish hands and feet, etc. (I refine my linework at the conclusion of each pose.)

Life drawing

 

  

I keep forgetting to post my sketches from life drawing, so here are a handful from the past few weeks. Looking forward to further improvement tonight.

Final figure drawings of 2009

 

 

 After taking a 6 month hiatus from figure drawing, I decided to trek over to the last MCAD-hosted cooperative of the year. It's within walking distance, only $5, professionally organized, and the model last night was exceptional. I was also glad to see many people in attendance on such a cold night.

As usual, my first half dozen gestures were abysmal. I don't know if I will ever be able to shake a handful of bad habits that consistently pop up when I am drawing people from life: poor proportions, over-reliance on line, inability to sense form. I suspect this is partly due to the remarkable human ability to sense even the slightest anatomical error in renderings of people. But I also sense a certain anxiety when I know I'm about to draw a human being, an anxiety that is absent when I attempt to draft any other subject. Weird.

Life drawing update

I'm training myself to take down lots of information very quickly while in-session with a model, and then flesh out the details on my own time. The only problem with this approach is that my lack of visual memory sometimes results in cartoony faces. That last one especially suffered from the "I forgot to record the facial features" syndrome. I also started a self portrait the other night, but when I realised it looked nothing like me I threw my pencil down in disgust and refused to do any more. It was very dramatic.

Co-op in jeopardy

My co-op organizer sent out an email over the weekend imploring us to recruit more artists. Apparently, attendance has not been high enough to recoup the model's fee. And I was considering skipping this week! Fortunately, Monday's model was very good and she even held a couple of longer 30-40 minute poses. I'm still way too slow, but at least my drawings weren't terrible this time around. I hope the co-op is still around come next Monday!

A rather unfortunate perspective, but it gave me a chance to work on feet. I also decided to bust out the conte for one of the gestures:

And a page from my sketchbook:

Figures

Two more 30-min drawings from my Monday night co-op. I had a lot of trouble making headway on the second drawing in the studio--I'm still not working as fast as I would like--but I got enough information down to do a little touch up after the fact. Face is still wonky and I didn't record any lighting information.

More figures

A couple of 30 minute drawings from co-op last night. I like the variety a bunch of shorter poses provide, but I am never able to move beyond a simple line drawing in half an hour. An additional fifteen minutes, maybe thirty would be sufficient for me to put in more interesting varied-line and basic shading. Something to flesh these out a bit more. Or maybe I'm just too slow. Many of the other attendees add tone almost immediately, but I can't stand shading a drawing with bad proportions.

Co-op-y goodness

I finally got around to searching the Cities for a good figure drawing cooperative, and found one within minutes! It's in a nearby neighborhood that also happens to feature my favorite food cooperative. So: 2 hours of drawing followed by perusing aisles of turnips and quinoa! What excitement!

I arrived late to last week's session but still had fun. Most of the poses were 10-15 minutes, which was fine for getting back into the figure drawing groove. Unfortunately, my drawing for the only long pose of the evening looked like this


So I've opted not to share it.