Author: Joan Vienot

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I forgot how to draw.

A couple of months ago at Studio b., we drew a model who was 8½ months pregnant.  If you read my blog post about it, you know that I was thrilled.  I didn’t think anything could top it.  But this week, the young mother brought her baby to model with her.  It was an unbelievable experience, and I forgot how to draw.  The poses were determined by the mother and her sense of the baby’s composure.  Some of the poses were 5 minutes, some were 10, and some were 20 minutes.  Our instructor, Heather Clements, did not forget how to draw, and in fact completed a number of beautiful captures of the mother and child bond, which she posted at the end of her blog last week.  The best one showed the mother sitting cross-legged, holding the baby close.  Heather was on fire.  I think she had that one completed while I was still trying to choose something to draw with.   I am posting a couple of mine, but you can see that I was overwhelmed and didn’t get very far.

The day before that, was the fourth session of the Charlotte Arnold portrait and head studies workshop I have been taking.  Charlotte suggested that we try to draw the portrait life-size or smaller, but mine ended up being sized at 150% again.  I drew and redrew several of the model’s features, and decided that I probably need new eyeglasses.  I re-drew some of the same lines wrong 6 or 7 times.  Many years ago, I taught drawing and painting in a high school in Colorado for 3 years before I moved to Florida.  I would tell my students not to erase the wrong line until after they had drawn it right, or they would draw the wrong line over and over again.  I proved that in this drawing.  Nevertheless, there are parts of it that actually resemble the model, if you don’t count her left eye which looks black-and-blue and swollen.

Today was the last day of the portrait workshop.  I decided the way to make the drawing life-size or smaller, was to plan to put some of the figure in as well.  I didn’t get very far into the figure, but I am pleased with the progress so far.  I expect that the figure will be fairly sketchy so that the focus is entirely on the head.  Maybe the hands should be developed, as long as they don’t compete with the face.

After the portrait class was over, we did a little show-and-tell of our drawings throughout the class.  Everyone showed remarkable improvement.

Charlotte gave us hand-outs at every single class, which demonstrated tips and techniques for proportioning and drawing different parts of the face.  She showed us examples in books that she had found helpful in her own drawing.   I have enough homework to last me another 6 months!  One of the books Charlotte showed us was The Intimate Eye – The Drawings of Burton Silverman. I had not seen Silverman’s work before, but I appreciate his style and have been trying for a long time to learn to draw in that same style.  Burton Silverman is my new favorite artist.

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The Luxury of A Longer Pose

We had a live model posing for the portrait workshop I am taking from  Charlotte Arnold, and for our final drawing this week we had the luxury of a longer pose.  When I am figure drawing, I need to try to get the whole figure drawn, or at least much of it as I can, which doesn’t allow much time on any one part of the body.  So getting more than 30 minutes to draw just a face in the portrait workshop was extraordinary.  The drawing is still unfinished because I spent the whole time on the face.

At our figure drawing session at Studio b. this week, we returned to the shorter poses and a familiar model.  I was able to capture bits and pieces of a likeness of her face, but only in a rough and hurried fashion, nothing worth showing.  But that showed me I am making progress with the portrait workshop I am taking.  I have posted only one drawing from the session, a simple one, just lines, one that captured the essence of that particular pose.

Click on the images for a larger view.

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A New Model at Studio b.

We had a new model at figure drawing at Studio b. this week.  Every model brings his or her own energy to the session, which adds to the excitement.  This model took a very wide variety of poses, some extremely energetic and ambitious, and others very natural and relaxed.  I enjoyed the variety and contrast.  I’ve begun taking a course on head studies and portraiture, so I tried to pay a little more attention to the facial features and attitude.  It never ceases to amaze me how I can make a passable effort until I focus and try to do a good job, and then it is as if I had never seen a pencil before, it turns out so badly.

Our instructor, Heather Clements, suggested we take a different approach to the initial gesture, and I will try to learn how to do that.  Her suggestion was to in effect draw a stick figure or a stick-skeleton, which can be roughed in fairly quickly to establish the overall directional line and then the individual limbs and sections of the body.  Once the “armature” is established, it is easier to compare relationships of one part to another, and then to make corrections.

As always with new models, I struggled trying to learn how to draw him.  You would not think there would be that much difference from one figure to the next, but there are worlds of difference.  We’ve been rotating models for a while a Studio b., so that we don’t return to a previous model for perhaps as long as 8 weeks, unless one has to fill in for another.  That has added to the challenge for me.  When I am struggling, I learn more.

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Head Studies and Portraits, continued…

Last week I had started a portrait in an open studio session I attended in order to get some time practicing for the Charlotte Arnold workshop I am taking on Tuesdays.  At right is the finished piece.  I am satisfied with it as a finished drawing, even though I didn’t capture the model’s exquisite beauty.  There was much about this drawing that felt very new while I was working it, the fine dreadlocks in particular.

This week our instructor asked us to pick a drawing from a book and try to draw it exactly the way the artist had, using the same media.  I picked a drawing by Nicholai Fechin.  I am not very comfortable with charcoal, his medium for this drawing — left to my own choice, I would have used a pencil.  The drawing I am posting, is my third try.  The original copy from the book is on the left, and my copy is on the right.
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Portraits: More Practice

One of the points of blogging about my art is to show my struggles, my occasional two-steps-backwards, as well as my one-step-forward.  So I bravely display my struggling efforts towards gaining some competence with portraiture.  I attended an open studio session today, to practice drawing a face.  The model stayed in the same pose throughout the 3-hour session, taking 5-minute breaks every half-hour or so.  I think that drawing “Plane Man” two days ago helped me to see form, highlights, and shadows.  I used the first half-hour to warm-up, using nupastels to make a full-color sketch.

Then I settled in and spent the next 3 segments using a soft graphite on Canson Rives paper that Charlotte gave me to try out.  I’ve used Canson Edition, and I liked Canson Rives even better.  Tooth is a texture in the paper that “grabs” onto the media, and makes it easy to make marks.  The tooth on the Rives paper was excellent, and one side had more texture than the other.  I nearly finished the drawing at left.  There are some obvious problems, places that actually make me wince as I review it, like the white line showing the leading edge of her neck, which grows strangely out of the reflected light under her chin.  I will have to work on that some more.  And I doubt anyone would recognize the model from my drawing, since I made her face, and especially her eyes, too narrow.  But I did do a fair job of suggesting her beautiful dreadlocks.

Unfinished, Nupastel and Graphtint

There was one last 30-minute segment left in the session, and I used that time to start a drawing of her profile, from just a few feet away.  I started with the white highlights, allowing the paper to show through for some of the midtones, and then I used a reddish-brown tinted graphite pencil to create the darker values.  But I didn’t even get to start on her hair before it was time to pack up.  If I finish this drawing, then I will decide whether to darken or wash out the graphtint for effect or to improve the representation.  Graphtint is a fun pencil, not as “washable” as a watercolor pencil, but able to be washed somewhat, to create a more watery effect which can be much softer than the pencil strokes alone.  It brightens the color when wet.  My apologies for the orange tone of the piece — it’s not orange at all, but rather a light brown.

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Making Mistakes Drawing a Clothed Model

We drew a clothed model at figure drawing at Studio b. this week.  It was challenging.  The striped shirt she wore created contours that helped describe her form, so the stripes had to be believable.  We had quick poses, none exceeding 30 minutes, and several were just 15 minutes.  I have posted a few of them.

The pose at left shows what happens when I fail to correctly proportion the figure in the initial gesture.  With the foreshortening I have shown by making the hips so much larger than the shoulders, the lower legs and feet should be positively huge.  Instead, I drew the lower legs and feet as if they belonged to Tinkerbell.  Mistakes in the initial gesture will remain for the entire drawing and ruin the finished piece.

Below are a couple of other drawings done the same night.  I like how they turned out, even though the distortions and inaccuracies are obvious.  The stool gave me some trouble.  I really don’t like stools — they are hard to draw.  I drew it without really looking at it, and the resulting mistakes can especially be seen in the conflicting and incorrect angles of the cross-bars between the stool legs.  So, either I can try to correct the errors, or just leave them and call them “artistic license”, ha ha!
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Portrait Drawing: Practice, Practice, Practice

Plane Man: Graphite, vine charcoal, pressed charcoal

Craftsmanship is different from art.  Craftsmanship is a familiarity and skill with subject and media.  I do a lot of work to try to improve my craftsmanship.  I think the craft of drawing is really an exercise in seeing.  By practicing, of course I am practicing with various media and subject matter or poses, but what I really am doing is learning to see better.   Today I started a 5-week, 3-hours per week, portrait workshop taught by Charlotte Arnold in Destin, Florida.  I’m not actually interested in drawing portraits, which is fortunate given that symmetry escapes me, but I would like a better understanding of how to draw the head for my figurative works.

Plane Man: Graphite

Charlotte referenced the 10,000 Hour Rule, which says in essence that if you practice anything for 10,000 hours, you are bound to get better at it.  She suggested we keep a sketchbook with us at all times, and to practice all the time, drawing ellipses if not actually representational subjects.

She brought in a life-sized plaster cast called Plane Man and set a floodlight on it, for us to draw from various angles.  I’d never actually seen Plane Man before, except in art supply magazines.  I probably should have picked it up and touched the various planes, to learn a little more about it before I started drawing it, but I just drew whatever I could see.  Some of the planes were indistinguishable from the adjacent planes because of the lighting, and the rest were much more obvious in the white plaster than they are in a person’s face.  Charlotte said that if we learn the angles on the Plane Man, we will know what to look for when attempting a portrait.

One half of Plane Man’s face was made of very angular planes, and on the other half the angles were more subtle, with maybe a hint of a curve here and there.  I drew on manilla paper, not intending to keep them except for a before-and-after reference that I can look at when the course is over.

Portrait workshop instructor Charlotte Arnold recently moved back to the area after being gone for nearly 8 years. She has spent the last 4 years in the Chicago area studying and working in the open studios at The Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Art in Chicago where she is an Artist Member. She is also a member of the Oil Painters of America, Portrait Society of America, Portrait Society of Florida, Women Artists of the Southeast, and Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. www.charlottearnoldfineart.com
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Figure Drawing without the Model

In the last post I showed the drawing above left, which I was unable to finish during the 30-minute pose.  I worked on it a little this evening, to give the hair, arms, and hands some form.   Without seeing the light on the form, I suppose my effort is passable, but the experience was hollow.  It felt like mere craftsmanship as I worked in my studio, without the power and intimacy of a live figure drawing session.

Unless the artist is there to talk about the work, ordinarily the viewer of a piece of art is far removed from the process — all he or she sees is the product.  But for me as the artist, at least 50% of the value of a figure drawing is in the process, in the capture of light and shadow across the living form.  Otherwise, why attend organized sessions and pay a model?  After all, there are countless photographs of people in every conceivable position, if it were just a matter of transposing a form onto the paper.  My joy is in the moment, with the actual lighting, the model, and the creative energy of the group.

All that said, I wish I had a photo so I could have finished the head and arms with more confidence!

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A Different Perspective

Unfinished final pose, 30 minutes

Every week I participate with other artists in the figure drawing sessions at Colleen Duffley‘s Studio b., in Alys Beach, Florida.  This week our instructor, Heather Clements, placed the model on a table in front of us.  Normally the model poses on the floor or on a short platform.

I struggled throughout the entire session, because all of the shapes I was used to seeing, looked completely different from this lower perspective.  It took me twice as long to draw anything, even in my warm-up drawings.  I have included a few here, below, to prove my A for effort.  I was only half-finished with the last pose when Heather called Time! at the end of the session.  I have posted it above left, unfinished, and will post the finished piece later if I don’t ruin it.  There is a good chance of that happening, because I won’t have the model there for a reference.  I don’t take photos of the model — some artists do, but I prefer the pressure and power of live figure drawing.  Of course that is a serious drawback, if I haven’t finished the drawing by the end of the pose.

In drawing that final pose, I broke the rules of figure drawing.  One of the essential things to strive for, is equal development of the drawing so that if interrupted at any single point, the drawing will be developed as a whole.  Anyone can see that I was working my way from the top of the page on down, instead of the whole page all at once.

Our model this week was extremely fit, and that added to the challenge.  Perfect musculature has to be drawn fairly accurately, or it will look very wrong.

Adding to my general discomfort was my pollen allergy.  The local pines are in full bloom, and pollen is everywhere this year, even inside my house!  Of course that’s my fault for having the windows open, but who can resist, when the springtime days approach 70º!

Heather, the instructor, as usual, was incredibly prolific and “spot-on” with her ink drawings.  Talk about confidence.  I bet she does crossword puzzles with a pen too!  Click here to see her art from this same session.

The top three drawings are Nupastel and graphite on Stonehenge paper.  The reclining pose uses tinted graphite, which intensifies in color when dampened.
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Slowing Down

Sometimes the art of drawing seems very out of place with our high-speed, instant-messaged, texted, digitized, and “shared” world.  After all, since the invention of the camera, and then with the advances of the computer, drawing probably seems archaic to some.

So why do I draw?  The primary reason I draw, is for the exhilaration of the capture of a form, a texture, a light pattern, or even a single line.  It takes time, and time often stops in the process.  The exhilaration can last from the beginning of the drawing to the very end, and then afterwards too, when I look at the work.

The day after the figure drawing session at Studio b. this week, I went to my first group meditation meeting, where again, time stopped.  I found similarities in the two experiences, both bringing me solidly into the present moment, both resulting in a sort of euphoria, and having the effect of energizing me.  There was a difference though, in that the drawing session as usual brought me peace with myself, a very powerful self, but group meditation brought me peace with everyone else in a powerful, unified oneness.  Both resulted in incredible power.

There are other results from the experience of drawing.  I find that I know so much more about something I have drawn, and I have a much richer experience of it.  My memories of most experiences become foggy over time, but when I look at a drawing I made, even some from college days, snippets of details of my life or the experience come to mind that I would never recall otherwise.

I think it’s all about slowing down and intensely focusing.  Except there is more to it than that, because slowing down and intensely focusing on a mathematics examination does not give me the same empowerment as drawing or painting.  I guess that’s why we call it Art.

I have posted the final piece I made in figure drawing this week.  I drew it with washable graphite on Stonehenge paper, with the intention of applying a loose wash over it to draw out some subtle tones, and instead I decided I wanted to keep the textures of the lines.  But I may yet apply a wash.  There is still plenty of opportunity to make a mess of it!