Last figure class

Figure drawing was a lot of fun this year! Our last class was yesterday. Wow that went by quickly! I thought I'd include a few photos of yesterday's work here with a short description of what we were trying to accomplish with each photo...

1. Warm up... using the side of a 1" piece of dry media [charcoal or conte], capture the general mass of the figure shape and add in the most important/descriptive lines - 20/30 seconds

2. Still warming up with the same method but now we're up to a minute. It's still not enough time to "see" and convert the information to paper. But it's a bit more descriptive. Sharon's reminding us to look for the musical/graceful/interesting lines. We're also supposed to be getting hands and feet onto these quick sketches - yikes, I can't move THAT fast!

3. More time now... although I can't remember exactly how long these ones were. I've switched to charcoal and I'm liking that better.

4. Still more time [I'm wishing I'd jotted it down, oops] - I think these might have been 3 minutes??? I'm having better luck with the extra time.

5. Switch to painting but using a similar method. Block in with one wash for first 10-20 seconds and then define further with a second color. I could have used less water and more pigment - these are faint. These were more difficult poses with limbs crossing, etc.

6. We switched to a heavier paper. I used some cheap watercolor paper and struggled with it from the get go. This is the only longer [10 min] pose that I did that turned even a teensy bit. I think I captured the light and shadow reasonably well. I struggled with the shape of the leg that was foreshortened [pointed directly at me]

I hope you enjoyed this little walk through a figure drawing class.

Figures - so enjoyable

I continue to be surprised at how energizing it is to draw from a live model. Our class did so again today and this image is one of the 15 minute drawings that I did towards the end. I had a challenging but interesting angle and I think it turned out reasonable well. Although I could have puttered an extra 10 minutes. Enjoy!

Figure unit

In today's art class we began a 4 week figure unit. I really enjoyed sketching today - we have such a great group of artists... some of the sketches were amazing. Sharon led us through some warm up exercises. First, we had the model do several very short poses so we could capture general body position - line angles for shoulders, hips, arms, legs, next did slightly longer poses and added hands/feet in simple mitt/sock shapes and the head placed at the proper angle. It's surprising how expressive these simple drawings can be. The pace is quick though, so we soon moved on to blocking in the chest and abdomen, then reviewed proportions for arms, legs, feet... We continued on adding more detail with each new sketch. At the end of the class we did a couple of 10 minute line drawings. Time really flies in these classes!
I've included one of my drawing here to show you the type of drawings we did. This sketch is about 24"X36" but even with that much paper I managed to run off the top with her head and off the bottom with her feet - clearly something I need to work on :o) If you'd like to see a bit more information on the process of figure drawing click here. Cheers!
P.S. Sharon posted some amazing photos of cedar waxwings on her blog. Click here to see them.