Year: 2010

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Returning to Drawing After Time Away

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!

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Vacation Trekking in Peru

I hiked the Salkantay Trail and part of the Inca Trail to Macchu Picchu in Peru last week, 9/14 – 9/24/2010, with a group sponsored by REI Adventures partnering with Mountain Lodges of Peru.  I had debated whether to take any books for reading, or just my sketchbook and camera.  As it turned out, I had no time for reading, and hardly any time for sketching, because we spent so much time and energy hiking.  Any down-time was consumed by rehydrating and recovering.  I did get 3 hours to sketch in Machu Picchu Sanctuary on my last day there.

The friend who was coming with me on this trip had to cancel, so I was with people I didn’t know, but we all became friends.  The group consisted of an incredible guide, Dalmiro Portillo Esquivel, and 9 people in addition to myself, ranging in age from 30 to 74 years old.  All were well prepared, physically, and we all were well-motivated.  Several other members of the group also were taking photographs,  all of us being amateurs, but some with technical training.  I myself have essentially no technical training in photography, trusting my instinct for composition and letting the automatic point-and-shoot camera do the rest.  For the most part, I just take advantage of time, place, and light with the subjects I happen upon.

These are my sketches and a few of my photographs.  Later I may put all of my vacation photos together in a photo-journal of sorts.

The Salkantay Trail

Andes Snowcap

Huamantay

Pretty Flowers Everywhere

Huamantay Glacier

Huamantay Glacier Cornice

Weaver, a beneficiary of www.yanapana.org, the educational arm of Mountain Lodges of Peru

Fuscia

Farmer at Home

Intihuatana Pyramid at Machu Picchu

Two Wayronas and the Unfinished Temple at Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu Structures
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The Silhouette of the Figure, The External Contour

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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Negative Space, continued

Warm-up Drawing
Warm-up Drawing

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 in Figure Drawing, with Heather Clements

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.

Interior form developed at right...
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The Figure is Beautiful

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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Guest Artist at Studio b: Susan Alfieri

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.

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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Portrait Drawing

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.
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.

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.

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Figure Drawing with Background

Live figure drawing is often very hurried, and the whole time is spent drawing only the model.  It is tempting to omit essential elements in the surroundings, because the artist always thinks he or she can draw them later.  As a result many figure drawings end up with a figure just floating in space, without context or compositional  “anchoring”.  Heather asked the Studio b. figure drawing group for a second week to continue to include backgrounds in our drawings.  She showed examples from several books, discussing different artists’ inclusion of background, or in many cases, invention of background.  One of the examples was a figurative piece, tied down similar to Gulliver by the Lilliputians, and it reminded me of  a playground sculpture of Gulliver that I had seen in Valencia, Spain, where the ties holding him down actually were hanging knotted ropes that children could climb on, and parts of his clothing formed slides and crawl spaces for them.  The children interacting with the sculpture then became the Lilliputians.  With those images in my head, I drew my own version of the figure in Lilliput.

 Gulliver Park, Valencia, Spain
I first drew the figure in white conte on a dusty blue charcoal paper, and then using graphite I drew the Lilliputians tying her down, with a little cityscape in the distance.  (Click on drawing for detailed image.)
I drew the next pose as it was and incorporated some of the studio behind the model, including a silhouette of one of the artists.

All of the artists worked hard on the assignment, each making a drawing that was remarkably different from the others, and each with success.
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Making Stuff Up

This week at Studio b., we had a new model.  I get better at drawing any particular model after I have drawn him or her a few times.  The first session with a new model is difficult for me.  The week was no exception — I struggled.  And as if drawing a new model wasn’t hard enough, Heather also directed us to draw the background in our pictures, to give a sense of environment.

In my first drawings, I drew a hint of the studio room, and the drapes covering the model’s support boxes.  There was not enough time for me to draw the model with much accuracy, and also to draw the studio as well.  I grew increasingly frustrated.  So on my last drawing, I gave up with the studio background, and instead I put my figure on a porch near the ocean.  Heather is always telling us to draw what we see, not what we know.  But all I had was what I know, so my porch siding and shadows might be a little unconvincing.  It’s all part of the learning process.