Author: Joan Vienot

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A Photo-Shoot in Chattanooga

Hollyhocks, Reliance, TN

Since my favorite subjects for photography are outdoor nature scenes and landscapes, I was thrilled to be asked to shoot photos and video of stand-up paddlers in Chattanooga, TN, where every shot is scenic.  I was shooting for Leslie Kolovich, host of the Stand Up Paddle Radio Show, for advance publicity for  Stand-Up Paddling events newly added to the  Chattanooga River Rocks Festival schedule this year in October.

My approach to nature photography is to watch where the light is doing something extraordinary and then to capture that.  Rarely do I do much with post processing, other than perhaps crop a little here or there to help the composition.

The photo at left was taken at the Webb Brothers country store at Reliance, Tennessee, on the bank of the Hiwassee River where the stand-up paddlers were navigating some whitewater.  The sun was shining from above and behind the hollyhocks, rendering the petals semi-transparent, and offering rim lighting on the fuzz on the stem and buds.  I didn’t enhance anything digitally, but I did trim the right side just a little, to make the composition more interesting.  Otherwise, no need to improve on Mother Nature!

Leslie interviewed me after the show.  The following link opens the podcast, and my segment is well into the second half of the podcast:

http://www.30aradioshows.org/stand-up-paddle-boarding/chattanooga-tennessee-river-rocks-festival-on-the-road-with-leslie-kolovich/

The story and some of the other photos are posted in The Stand Up Paddle Radio Show website, at http://www.supradioshow.com/2011/06/chattanooga/

The “On the Road With Leslie” is published with my photos in the print magazine, The Standup Journal.  Here’s a sample (link).

Most of my images are available for purchase.  Contact me if you are interested. — Joan Vienot

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Professional Models in Figure Drawing

Modeling for figure drawing is a hard job.  Try sitting still in a posed body position for only 5 minutes, and then try it for 25 minutes, and you will see what I mean.  Even seemingly-relaxed poses, even reclining poses, can become torturous.  Our model at Studio b. this week is a an experienced professional.  His poses are rock solid, with no sinking, from beginning to end, from head to foot.  Fresh out of a boot for a repaired Achilles tendon, our model first performed 5 1-minute poses and then we graduated to longer poses and the final drawing was about 45 minutes.

The model challenged us later in the session, by posing with a picture frame as a prop.  Props hugely increase the challenge of figure drawing.  I drew the figure first, and then placed the picture frame.  Ideally, I would have drawn both at the same time, as a whole unit, because there were interesting negative shapes created by the frame.  But I was being cautious, having drawn this same model with this same frame but in a different pose, sometime last year, and having had trouble with the proportions at that time.  My drawing with the frame is more correct this time.

Our instructor, Heather Clements, has often suggested to me that I vary the direction of my pencil strokes to help convey the rounded form of the figure.  I rarely remember to use that technique.  I usually just draw the value patterns of light and shadow to express form, rather than changing  the direction of my pencil strokes.  But on the final drawing of the night, the model stood with one knee advancing towards me.  I varied the direction of my pencil strokes to show the rounded form of that thigh and knee, and I think it was successful.  As a result,the sense of mass in his left thigh is much stronger than for example, his upper right arm, which I drew as one mass, with pencil strokes all going the same direction.

Most of my images are available for purchase.  Contact me if you are interested. — Joan Vienot

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Two Steps Forward in Figure Drawing

Click to see much larger image.

I am a better artist.  I drew more like I want to draw, at the weekly figure drawing session at Studio b. last night.  It’s nice to have a night when drawing comes easily.  Well, it’s still work, I have to remember to breathe.  One of the other artists commented that she could hear me taking big breaths — I hope I am not too distracting to the others!

I am powerful.  I attended I Can Do It – Toronto 2011, last weekend.  The conference featured a number of authors published by HayHouse, including Louise Hay herself, Wayne Dyer, Marianne Williamson, and many others.  As is typical for me when I am going away even if for just a few days, I felt compelled to complete all the tasks I had been putting off for months.  So the morning I flew to Toronto, I had gotten only a couple of hours of sleep the night before, which probably made me particularly susceptible to suggestion.  That, in combination with the charismatic, perhaps even hypnotic speakers, left me supremely empowered upon my return.  I am drawing better, and I am guessing the conference is a factor.

We had uninstructed open studio at Studio b. this week, warming up with a number of 1-minute and 2-minute poses, and then some that were a little longer.  We finished with two 25-minute poses and then our last pose was 15 minutes.  My drawing of the last pose is at lower left.  Click on it to see much larger detail.

My drawings were successful not necessarily because of anatomical correctness or portraiture, but because they are believable, effectively communicating what I feel was the essence of the model in her pose at the time that I was drawing her.  In particular, the pose seated on a folding chair caught the complete relaxation of the figure, especially the slight paunch of relaxed stomach muscles.

In the drawing of the clothed model, the portraiture is not a likeness, but I like the textures of pencil strokes and I also like the play of the darks and lights leading the eye through the picture.

Most of my images are available for purchase.  Contact me if you are interested. — Joan Vienot

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Carving the Void: Negative Shapes

The model who posed for our figure drawing session at Studio b. last week returned this week.  For the past four months, we’ve had a different model nearly every session.  That has added to the challenge in that every week we have to become familiar with a different body type or different proportions.  Having the same model two weeks in a row was a luxury.

Our instructor, Heather Clements, provided a focus for us, suggesting that we run the drawing off the page, effectively cropping it in order to create negative shapes out of the negative space.  Often in the rush of trying to get the figure drawn as quickly as possible before the timed pose ends, the background, if treated at all, is merely an afterthought.  By drawing the figure so that parts of it intersect with the edge of the page, it no longer floats on the page, but instead becomes anchored.  The negative space, the space surrounding the figure, is then broken up so that it becomes negative shapes instead of just open space.  Negative shapes help the piece to read as a composition.  Art imitating life, carving the larger voids into smaller pieces makes it more manageable.

A good mat and frame can help with cropping, but it is better for the artist to have made those decisions instead of leaving it up to the framer.

The sketches included here are from this week’s session.

Most of my images are available for purchase.  Contact me if you are interested. — Joan Vienot

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Working With Other Artists

It is different when working in a studio setting with other artists, as opposed to working by myself in my own home studio.  There is no doubt that sometimes being alone is the best way to get work done.  But the comaraderie of being with other artists, all working under the same conditions, provides an energy and inspiration that helps me to go farther and do more in a shorter period of time than I ever would working alone.

That certainly was the case at the figure drawing session at Studio b. this week.  I was struggling, and would have quit halfway through the session if I was drawing alone.  Each pose presented new challenges for me, mostly because the model was standing or sitting on a swing by the pool, requiring each pose to fit within a geometric space bordered by the swing and the ropes.

I think that all of the drawings that I did have potential, but I don’t feel that I did justice to the model’s beauty and fitness.  Yet there is an expressive quality to each that I recognize as true.

I have decided that even though I love the texture, I don’t like charcoal paper because it wrinkles and dents very easily.  So I intend to use my stock of charcoal paper for warm-up drawings and gestures.  The first drawing is on black charcoal paper.  The rest are on Stonehenge paper, which is heavy enough that it can take quite a bit of handling without wrinkling.

Most of my images are available for purchase.  Contact me if you are interested. — Joan Vienot

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Thinking about Composition in Figure Drawing

Having spent nearly two years improving my skills at figure drawing, I think I would like to spend more time thinking about how the figure is presented on the paper, which begins to determine whether the piece can stand alone as a composition.  When I look back at the bulk of my work, the pieces that appeal the most to me have an unfinished quality, in that perhaps I did not try to capture the figure in its entirety.  I’d like to preserve that quality.

This week at Studio b.’s figure drawing session, we had an exquisitely beautiful model, and I found that I still need a lot of work on portraiture, as I think I failed miserably to get a likeness let alone to show how pretty she is.  However, I like the pieces I turned out, since they have just a little more “atmosphere” than much of my previous work.  Something seemed different about this night at Studio b., perhaps the bad weather, it being the night of the terrible Tuscaloosa tornado.

At left I also am posting the drawing, now more developed, that I had started on the last day of the portrait workshop that I was taking from Charlotte Arnold last month.  When I last posted it, it was primarily a head study.  I used a photograph of that model and her pose,  for reference.

Most of my images are available for purchase.  Contact me if you are interested. — Joan Vienot

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Figure Drawing with a Live Model

To a figure drawing artist, the title of this post is redundant, but the non-artist may not know that we use live models in figure drawing.  To this point, I have been a bit of a fanatic about it, allowing errors and inaccuracies to be a part of the final drawing.

But I am thinking that I would like to take a photograph for reference for correcting and finishing a live-model drawing outside of the studio, away from the live model.  My hesitancy to use a camera comes from my concern that I may lose some of the immediacy of expression if I work on my drawings very much outside of the studio.  But I would like the accomplishnent of a more complete, or perhaps I should say, more technically accurate drawing, which can more easily be done, I think, with a less hurried pose or with a photograph for reference.

Next week I’m bringing a camera to the Wednesday night figure drawing session at Studio b., if the model doesn’t mind me taking a photo.

Following are a few warm-up gestures from this week’s session, followed by a drawing from a longer pose.
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More Fun with Encaustic Painting at Studio b.

I took an Encaustic Painting workshop from Rae Broyles at Studio b. last fall and I had a lot of fun, so I signed up for another workshop by Rae a few weeks ago, again at Studio b.  Rae demonstrated a number of techniques, and I tried a few.  I used stamps and stencils on the first piece, above left.  In the second piece, center, I built up texture by accretion, and in the third painting, I put the hot pigmented wax on top of the background to make the foreground stand out in relief.  At the end, I used gold leaf on the seahorses to give them a little sparkle.

I enjoy doing something like this, every once in a while, just “playing”.  It’s entirely different from my usual art.  It’s great fun, and maybe a little dangerous too, playing with hot wax and blowtorches!

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The Joy of Drawing

When I am figure drawing, I am an artist without a message.  I’m not trying to tell you anything.  I just draw because I enjoy drawing.  Well, maybe it’s a compulsion, because sometimes I have to admit, it’s a little uncomfortable, frustrating, and at times perhaps even painful.  But for the most part, the challenge of figure drawing is in the mastery, being able to portray what I see, or what I think I see.  By practicing every week, I am becoming more confident.

The drawing I am posting here was difficult because the facial features look very different when a figure is reclining than they do when the figure is upright.  I think that the portrait class I finished taking last week helped me a lot.  I will need to continue to practice heads and faces in different positions and attitudes.  I still feel hesitant with faces, and I still spend a lot of time guessing, but my guesses seem more accurate now.

This drawing was made with a graphite pencil on Stonehenge paper.  I drew it at the regular Wednesday night session of Figure Drawing at Studio b., in Alys Beach, FL.  Heather Clements is the instructor.

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Figure Drawing: Tension vs. Relaxation

Sometimes I am bone tired when I get to my regular weekly figure drawing session after a full day of work.  Last night was like that.  But it never fails, after the first half hour of drawing, I am energized again.  Is it me?  Is it being in the good company of other like-minded artists, like Betty Cork and Steve Wagner and Heather Clements?  Is it the amazing creative atmosphere of Colleen Duffley‘s  Studio b.?  All of the above, I suppose, plus a model who is invested in the process, who works hard for us, as all of our models do.

After the usual series of warm-up gestures from 30-seconds to a few minutes, figure drawing instructor Heather Clements suggested that we focus on where the figure was showing tension, and where it was showing relaxation, and to draw the two aspects differently, perhaps exaggerating the contrast between the two.  She suggested that the parts of the figure under tension might be drawn with straighter, shorter lines and more angular shapes, with more abrupt changes in quality and direction, while the more relaxed parts would be smoother, with longer lines and less angular shapes.  I can’t say that my drawings actually show that intention, but I was trying to be conscious of it as I drew.  As always when I am learning something new, I will have to sit down and do some practice drawings, thinking about it non-stop, in order for it to become habit.

I have posted some of my gestures and drawings from throughout the evening.  Nupastel and graphite are still my favorite media.  A close floodlight, positioned low, put strong highlights and dark cast-shadows on the model.