This week in Figure Drawing at Studio b., Heather Clements instructed us to focus on light patterns and shadow patterns. We worked with strong lighting, toning only the darks, all the same value, and leaving the paper untoned to show the lighted areas. This high contrast lighting is very powerful, with much of the drawing reading as a silhouette. Heather directed us to add intermediate values in our later drawings. She kept a strong light on the model throughout the session.
This week we had a new model and open studio figure drawing. Creativity was a-buzzing!
There are many decisions to be made when starting a new drawing, and having a new unfamiliar model adds to the mix. After looking at the model and deciding whether the pose is good for me or whether I need to move to a different vantage point, then I have to decide what medium I am going to use, which then helps me decide what paper to use for that medium. I take a big art-box with me to the drawing sessions, and a board with several different papers clipped to it, and sometimes I bring a watercolor pad as well. I don’t necessarily have a favorite medium that I work with all the time. Most certainly, I prefer graphite , but it’s fun to use different media. My art-box also contains black and brown permanent pens, water soluble blue and black pens, charcoal, tinted charcoal, washable graphtint (tinted graphite) pencils, conte, wax crayons, watercolor pencils, and nupastels.
After I pick my media, next I face the choice of approach. Here’s where I usually just jump in and start working the gesture, without thought for whether my initial marks are going to contribute to or detract from the end result. Since every pose is timed, the immediacy of working from a live model requires some quick decision-making and the guts to just go for it, not worrying too much about whether I am going to turn out a masterpiece or not. In the end, there is usually something about every drawing that I like, even if there are proportional inaccuracies or places where I got something completely wrong. That is why I keep coming back to Studio b. for Wednesday night Figure Drawing.
Some of our group’s drawings will be on display at Studio b. this-coming Thursday, November 4, 2010, for the b+b@b event to announce Studio b.’s partnering with the Brogan Museum of Art and Science to celebrate the exhibition of 50 Baroque Italian masterpieces, which will be debuting in Tallahassee in March of 2011.
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This week the instructor of Studio b.‘s figure drawing session, Heather Clements, drew horizontal contours around the model’s arms, legs, and waist, to help us see the the bulk of those parts of the figure. We had some fun making drawings a la Sergio Poddighe, with portions of the figure sliced out and missing. Then we did some longer poses, and I very much enjoyed drawing contours of the figure without a lot of shading, letting my lines express the volumes instead of light and shadow. The practice with contours earlier in the session helped me to see the shapes better. |  |
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Last week the model at Studio b. was lit with a close floodlight, heightening the light-dark contrast. 
I warmed up with red crayon and then changed to charcoal pencil.
I had been on vacation and away from figure drawing for several weeks. It seems like I am always tighter and more controlled, when I haven’t drawn for a while, trying to be more exact, trying to get it “right”. Warming up with crayon and charcoal pencil kept me from being too careful. But I became more controlled in my final drawing, and consequently I didn’t get very much of it finished during the drawing session. I had focused on the near hand while the model was there, and to retain that focus, I silhouetted much of the remainder of the figure when I finished it later.
I have so much appreciation for the models, who often find that after 5 minutes into what they thought was a comfortable pose, the pose becomes distinctly uncomfortable, and then there they are, stuck for another 25 minutes or however long the pose is. When the model was given a break midway through this final pose, his right leg had gone to sleep, and it was a few minutes before he could walk. I can’t imagine what it must be like to sit for a painting, posing for days!
For several weeks at Studio b.‘s figure drawing sessions, we have been focusing on negative space. This week our focus was the silhouette of the figure, essentially the contour line which separates negative space from positive space. Our instructor Heather Clements says that when the contour is interesting, that’s half the battle. Learning to accurately draw the contour comes first, and after that the artist decides what elements to exaggerate to make the contour more expressive. Heather directed us to fill in the positive shape so that it reads as a single shape. I had a lot of fun with this exercise, since I was thinking I would not be turning out anything worth keeping, which freed me to use some colors and textures I might not ordinarily use. The night passed quickly. In this post I have decided to also include all of my warm-up drawings, to show the differences in approach to each pose, and to give an idea of what is actually happening in a 2½ hour figure drawing session at Studio b. The final drawing is shown first, followed by the initial 30-second and one-minute gestures, progressing up to 4-minute gestures, all of which I usually end up throwing away, and then the 15-minute silhouette drawings.
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This week at Studio b., Heather Clements led us in continuing to explore negative space and negative shapes, which involves drawing the area around the figure, instead of drawing the figure. We started this exercise last week. I found it easier to focus on negative shapes this week, and began to play with the negative space a little in my later drawings, adding some color and other shapes. I used charcoal pencil and then nupastel on the 1- and 2-minute warm-up drawings, and I used water-soluble ink pen and watercolor pencils on the longer poses. I left the positive shapes stark white, waiting until I washed over the drawings at the end to perhaps add a little tone to the figure.
Even after practicing this exercise for only two weeks, I can see shapes better as abstractions. An arm is not just an arm, for example, it is also the shape around it that defines it as an arm.
The drawings at lower right are the same pose. I had time left over after I finished one, so I started the second one.
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Negative space is the space surrounding the “subject”. Negative spaces which are bounded by the subject are called negative shapes. The boundaries of negative shapes also can be the edge of the art piece, or the edge of another shape. Heather showed examples of negative space, and we spent the entire 2½ hours finding and filling in negative space, from warm-ups through extended poses. Well, there was one pose where I just couldn’t stand any more ignoring of the form, and I quickly drew a rough approximation of the light on the form, below right. Otherwise, in each drawing, the positive shape was drawn, or rather, not drawn, as a silhouette. Our model was very cooperative, positioning to create empty spaces in his pose. When negative shapes are interesting, they can be very helpful in defining the form. We recognize many things by the silhouette of the shape. So even though the interior of the form was not developed, anyone looking at these drawings can tell that they are depictions of a male figure.
Sometimes our studio workspace is overflowing with people, but on this night I was the only student. I am so grateful that Colleen Duffley, owner of Studio b., continues to provide this creative opportunity through thick and thin. And Heather Clements, the instructor, talked to me as if I were a whole classroom of students. She is such a professional. She drew along with me, practicing the same exercises. Later she showed me examples of Egon Schiele’s work, pointing out how he used negative space to make his figurative work even more interesting. Such intense focus on negative space is sure to make me more aware of it in my compositions, even as I have been “seeing” more negative shapes in my ordinary daily activities today.
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There is something about the figure as an art subject that fascinates me. Most North-Americans are raised with the view that nudes are naked and nasty, instead of beautiful and natural. Like everyone in our mass-marketed-to-death culture, I have been indoctrinated with the mindset that thin, idealized proportions are beautiful, and fat and wrinkles less beautiful. Since I have achieved middle-age, and I have acquired a few wrinkles myself, and an extra pound here or there, I am looking at people differently. Certain wrinkles show a time of loss and grief, others show laughter, some show a lot of hours working in the sun. Wrinkles lend visual character, a sag shows maturity, a little fat here or a paunch there has probably been earned. But the beauty I am most interested in, is the play of light across the subject, any subject. It’s just that the figure happens to be a difficult subject, one which challenges me every single time I attempt to draw it, so it becomes a game to me, to achieve a reasonable resemblance as well as to find the light. The folds and shadows of fabric, while challenging, are very forgiving, in that the untrained eye might never notice if you’ve drawn a clothed figure “wrong”. The nude figure on the other hand, is unforgiving — if I draw something in the wrong place, it looks wrong, and anyone looking at it can tell it is wrong. That is the construct of realism that I like to work within, and that is one of my joys in nude figure drawing. Another is the sheer immediacy, in that a model can only hold a pose for just so long. And finally, I love the camaraderie and the energy of the other artists, and I am always inspired by seeing the way they tackled the problems they found in the same pose I was drawing, but from another point of view. I guess I can even be a little philosophical about it, in that multiple points of view are all true, and there can be no arguing. Maybe political leaders should take figure drawing classes!
Below are drawings done at Studio b. at the weekly figure drawing session.
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At our weekly figure drawing session at Studio b. last night, we were privileged to have one of the regular participants as our guest artist, Susan Alfieri, a retired teacher living in Inlet Beach, FL. Susan enjoys working with Vis-a-Vis water soluble markers to sketch the form and then she uses a clear water wash to allow the marker lines to bleed and blend to create tonal relationships. The impermanent black marker wash separates into blues, violets, and shades of bronze. I used a blue pen similarly, to produce one of my favorite drawings last winter, on February 12, 2010. You never know what’s going to happen when you wash over the drawing. Because the marker is impermanent, it needs to be protected from sunlight, by UV-protectant spray or UV-resistant glass. |  |
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I enjoy media exploration. After working with the markers on smooth (hot press) watercolor paper, I tried out a tinted charcoal pencil from a set that I had just bought, which also is water soluble, but the colors don’t separate. It leaves the grainy marks of the pencil showing through the wash on the textured cold press watercolor paper. I used Derwent “Bilberry”. There was some discussion and experimentation with the model’s pose. It is not very important to me how the model is posed except that I am not fond of contortions that look like they would hurt an ordinary person. I do like asymmetrical poses, and I like poses where air spaces create negative shapes in the composition, but usually, if the model takes a position they can hold for the duration of the pose, then I can move around the room to find a vantage which gives me some lighting I like. |
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On Saturday I attended an all day workshop on Portrait drawing, taught by Heather Clements at Studio b. I’ve taken this class from Heather before, but it was spread out over several weeks, so this time it was intense, being all in one day. First we studied a skull to learn the underlying structure of the face. |
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Next we drew Heather, and then we drew her skull underneath her features that we had just drawn. Our final drawing was also of Heather. When she was teaching the location of features in relation and proportion to each other, she explained that proper position of the features was perhaps more important than whether the drawing was a good likeness, accuracy being less important than not turning the person into something grotesque or sinister. |
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I don’t expect I will ever be much of a portrait artist because I don’t have that much interest in it, but I would like to put more accurate faces on my figurative work, so I will take the next Portrait class too.
Postscript: Lest anyone think otherwise, let me say my drawing does not compliment Heather — it has a lot of distortions. She forgave us all before we even started.
