I don’t have time for stage fright in figure drawing. No performance anxiety allowed. No worries about perfection. No time to test the water, I have to just jump right in. I start with warm-up sketches, timed one-minute gesture drawings. I am drawing so fast and furiously that there is no time to be afraid. I go through a lot of paper at the start of every session, knowing that every warm-up drawing will probably be thrown in the wastebasket when I get home.
It all starts with making the first mark on the paper, usually a broad gestural sweep showing the general directional line of the posed model’s position. I like to use something soft, and light in value, a color which can be incorporated into my final drawing. Soft chalk-like pastels are a little messy because they are so soft, so I use nupastel, which is a little harder, but not as hard as conte which is made of graphite mixed with clay. I use conte sometimes, for my warm-ups, but with conte I am always risking permanent damage to my paper or my drawing by the unfortunate specks of hard material that are often in conte. 
My favorite medium is very soft graphite, in a pencil. But in my warm-up drawings, I sometimes never graduate from nupastel to graphite. Instead the whole time is spent building shapes onto that first gestural directional line, correcting and re-correcting to get proportions and shapes more or less “right”. The 5-minute warm-up drawing at right shows multiple corrections of the position of the left leg.
Below are my final 30-minute drawings for the evening. I’m having fun drawing on paper that is lightly toned tan or gray, using white nupastel to make the highlighted areas stand out, and using graphite for the darks. For the midtones I just let the paper show through. I’ve been using my fingers to mush the media together in places, creating a softer texture.
We draw every Wednesday evening at Studio b. in Alys Beach. Last night I had the pleasure of drawing beside accomplished artists Nancy Nichols Williams, David Orme-Johnson, Susan Alfieri, and Denielle Harmon. I was exhausted, having taught all day at one of my other jobs, and then attending the opening of Donnelle Clark’s mixed media show in Rosemary Beach before coming to draw at Studio b.
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Most of my images are available for purchase. Contact me if you are interested. — Joan Vienot