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.