Year: 2011

Posted on by — Leave a comment

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.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

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!
Posted on by — Leave a comment

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
Posted on by — Leave a comment

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!

Posted on by — Leave a comment

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.
Posted on by — Leave a comment

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!

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Bare Bones of Figure Drawing

Heather Clements taught a 4-hour figure drawing workshop at Studio b. Saturday afternoon.  She used slides to show us where the underlying skeletal structure and muscular anatomy were evident in paintings and sculptures by such artists as Rubens, Michelangelo, daVinci, Philip Perlstein, Picasso, Egon Schiele, and others.  She also gave us  a packet of photos and drawings of the skeletal and muscular anatomy to study and use as a reference.

Our initial assignment was to try to imagine the skeleton underneath the model’s pose and to draw that skeletal pose.  It was a hard job.  When I attended the University of Northern Colorado, I studied anatomy, not for my Fine Arts major, but for my other major, Health, Physical Education and Recreation.  But that was many years ago, and I have forgotten most of it.  So I just copied what Heather had shown us, as best I could.  I was impressed with how quickly it began to make sense, and I began to feel very comfortable with it.  Below is the progression of some of my warm-up skeleton gestures, with the last one showing the fleshy form added during in the final 30 seconds of an 8-minute pose, after the imaginary skeleton was already drawn.

This turned out to be an immensely helpful exercise, as I found it much easier to locate the various parts of the figure in relation to each other later on in the session.  But rarely do things ever go quite the way I wish they would when I am developing a new awareness, and I complicated things further by trying out some colored conte that I had been carrying around for about half a year in my box of drawing media.  I’ll probably get up the nerve to try the conte again, but I know for sure that I will be getting out my anatomy books and studying the skeletal structure of various poses.  Below are my two final drawings from today’s workshop.
Posted on by — Leave a comment

Figure Drawing: It’s a Work-Out!

You might not think anyone would work up a sweat while figure drawing, but it gets pretty intense when I am strongly focused.  OK, it’s nothing like a Spin class, but it can be Work!  I draw hurriedly, especially during the “warm-up” phase at the beginning of the session, when drawing is very difficult.  Later in the session, when I can automatically draw a curve, or locate a “landmark”, it becomes more like “play”, but in the beginning it can really be a struggle, with my curves and angles often going completely the wrong way from how they should be drawn.

I try not to worry too much about it, because if I judge my results along the way, I will freeze up.  And I am very selective about the people I will listen to who might criticize my work.  That is why I so appreciate our instructor, Heather Clements.  When she says, “That leg looks broken,” or “That arm looks like it is coming backwards instead of going forwards,”  it really helps.  I usually can’t see that sort of thing myself at the time, until it is pointed out to me.  If I am working in my home/studio, I will look at my art in the mirror, a trick that helps me to see those disproportions or imbalances.  The mirror image looks completely different from what I am used to seeing while working on the piece, so it is easy to see when a leg looks “broken” or an arm looks like it is going the wrong way.  I’ve noticed that before with other things — my old cat, April Alice, had dark fur around one eye, with dark eye liner, and white fur around the other eye, but her face, which I saw everyday, seemed symmetrical to me.  But when I would hold her and look at her in the mirror, she looked like one eye was a lot bigger than the other.  Apparently my mind compensates and “perfects” images as I look at them, hence the value of the mirror image when I am correcting a drawing.

The Wednesday evening figure drawing session at Studio b. this week seemed like more of a work-out than usual, probably because I was very tired.  But maybe I was still keyed up and pouring more energy into everything I was doing.  I was in the middle of teaching a 2½ day course for my day job, a required certification course for people in my profession.  When I teach, I try to do it with high energy and enthusiasm, being educator, entertainer, and expert, all at the same time.  My physical fatigue however meant that my hand cramped up sooner when I was drawing, and my arm got tired.  A couple of times I quit drawing before the end of the pose, which I never do, ordinarily.  But a couple of times I tried to finish the drawing after the pose was over too, taking time away from my drawing of the next pose, so I don’t know what that was about.

Posted on by — 2 Comments

Figure Drawing with Props: Fear of Rejection

Sometimes a model will bring props, which can imbue something completely different in the drawing.  The model in my drawings shown here brought cuffs and a collar, which introduces a sexual component to the poses.  For me, the image in my mind’s eye changed from nude to naked, and the atmosphere felt a little dangerous, and I wondered whether I should be asking what the “safe” word was, just in case!

Then I got busy and started drawing.  I drew the seated pose on the left using Stabilo water-soluble pencils, putting just a touch of red in her hair and on her nipples to increase the sensationalism.  For the same reason, I chose to use red paper for the drawing on the right, which was made with white Nupastel and graphite.  The color red can heighten the viewer’s emotional or subconscious reaction.

These poses were made sexual by the props, and while drawing them I realized realized how very conservative I am with my art.  Art history was one of my areas of emphasis for my degree, so I have seen plenty of art.  I have seen outright obvious sexuality in art, both in classical work and contemporary.  I always considered myself to be fairly accepting and open-minded towards other artists’ work, but when it came to me myself drawing a subject a little bit outside the boundaries of my own vanilla experience, I had to face my fear of rejection.  After all, Victorian propriety is ingrained in our culture.

While some artists intend to offend, I mean no offense with my drawings.   But I know that figure drawing as a genre does not have universal appeal.   Some segments of our society are very sensitive about the human figure.  Some cultures are averse to making representational images of people, feeling that it steals the soul.  Others may view the human body as something shameful, instead of a thing of beauty.  I have worked around swimming pools my entire life, so I am fairly comfortable being around people with very little clothing on, or none.  The human form interests me as nothing else does.  I would never be able to spend this much time drawing tree after tree after tree, for example — I would die of boredom.  The figure remains ever interesting to me.

But I remember when I was a young adult, proudly showing off one of my drawings that was accepted into a juried art show at the university I was attending, and having a family member remark that it was “obscene, that I should be ashamed.”  I was first of all aghast at the bad manners, but secondly, I felt pity for my critic, because that particular drawing had no gender or sexuality at all, and the figure was neither clothed nor unclothed.  My teacher told me it was selected by the juror because of  the sheer force of expression, and not for any technical merit.   Nevertheless, for that family member, it evoked shame.

One of my friends often says “Observe and detach”, and I think that’s good advice when seeing something that is outside of our immediate construct, when our tendency is to judge it for being different, or to judge ourselves for paying any attention to it.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Dueling Pencils, Figure Drawing at Studio b.

Last Wednesday evening was “open studio” at Studio b., which is to say that we did not have a scheduled instructor.  The tentative plan is to schedule guest artists on the third Wednesday of every month, and open studio if a guest isn’t scheduled.  One of the regular figure drawing artists, Steve Wagner, was asked if he would share his approach to the figure with the group, and he said he would and he asked me to also.  I laughingly referred to our session as Dueling Pencils, since we were presenting together.

Each week the artists warm up with a number of 30-second gesture drawings, progressing to one-minute, then two-minute, and perhaps 5-minute or 10 -minute drawings before we move on to longer poses.  By doing these quick poses, we “wake up”, improving our hand-eye coordination, learning what the model looks like, and trying to remember how to draw.

Steve and I each talked for a minute and then we each demonstrated a 30-second gesture.  Steve’s gestures actually map out the landmarks and the masses of the figure, whereas my 30-second warm-up drawings are little more than a vague scribble, usually way out of proportion and perhaps only suggesting the angles of the body and limbs and the general directional line of the figure.

When we advanced to the 2-minute gestures, Steve and I each showed and talked about our gestures, and everyone turned their papers outward towards the center and showed their efforts.   It is interesting to see how the other artists approach the figure — that’s one of the values of practicing in a group.  Sometimes I am lucky, turning out a gesture that might have a sense of completion without further development.  I felt like that happened with my first 2-minute gesture, shown above left.

Our model had ballet experience, and it showed in her poses, especially with the positions of her hands and feet, and her attitude, in the tilt of her head.  We were channeling a little Degas, I think.

The two works I have posted below are 30-minute drawings from later in the session.  The last one is drawn with watercolor pencils which I finished later in my studio at home.