Tag: Studio b

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A Pregnant Pause at Studio b.

The Wow! factor at our figure drawing session at Studio b. was incredible this week, with a model 8 months pregnant.  I had never before had the opportunity to draw an obviously pregnant model.  I think the other artists at Studio b. were as excited about the prospect as I was — the gallery was packed, standing-room only.  We warmed up with the usual very short poses, and then for the longer poses, we used a floodlight to give extra emphasis to the shape of her belly and her swollen breasts and radiant face.   Some of the artists even got to see the baby kick!  By the end of the session, I suspect we all, and for sure I know that I, completely adored this woman who was willing to share this intimate experience with us.  Following are a few of my drawings from this evening.  Our instructor, Heather Clements, also did some great drawings and posted them on Heather Clements’ Blog.
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Figure Drawing: Arms and Legs

Our instructor, Heather Clements, suggested that we focus on arms and legs at our regular figure drawing session at Studio b. this week.  No matter what she gives us as a focus, I feel my overall awareness increasing.

I’ve been blogging about the process of drawing and the making of my art for close to a year now.  Warren Tape, my webmaster, is making some improvements in the design of my website, and in reviewing the changes so far, I went back and looked at some of my postings throughout the year.

I was a little surprised at the volume of work.  And I was pleased with the progression.  I had made a commitment to myself to go to figure drawing every Wednesday, and I’m glad I did.  I can’t say that figure drawing is ever easy — in fact it pretty much is always a challenge, and that’s what keeps it fresh and exciting to me.

Following are a few of the warm-up drawings from this week, and then a couple of drawings done later in the evening.  The drawing at the top of this post was also done later in the evening.  The sketches showing only the model’s head or arm are from the actual focus period in the middle of the session.
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Figure Drawing with Graphite Wash

Preliminary drawing using water-soluble graphite, prior to washing

Water-soluble graphite drawing after washing (Click for larger detailed image)
Both the process and the product of drawing are immensely appealing to me.  One of the reasons it is always a challenge is because there are so many variables between the nature of the drawing surface and the drawing implement itself.  I have started learning to use a water soluble graphite pencil, which makes marks that look the same as a regular soft graphite pencil, but will bleed and run when it is wet with plain water.  Above is a new drawing on the left, that I made this week, and on the right is how it looks after it has been brushed with a wet paintbrush.  I have allowed the grainy texture of many of the pencil strokes to show through, so that it still retains some of the quality of a drawing instead becoming a monochromatic painting.  (Ignore the blue tint in the drawing on the left — that’s just my impatience with my camera.)

Below are some other drawings I made at the regular weekly figure drawing session at Studio b. this week.  The first one is one of my favorites from this year.  I wish I could draw like this all the time.  I think I was inspired by the difficulty of the pose.  Our model was amazing.

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Strong Light in Figure Drawing

Sometimes things go easily in figure drawing.  Sometimes my hand-eye coordination is better, I am more focused, my mind is unstressed, and the drawings seem to just flow.  This week the figure drawing session at Studio b. was like that.

Sessions like this, coupled with last Saturday’s super-fun encaustic workshop, make me think maybe I should follow my bliss, take the leap, and start producing art fulltime.  I’m not prepared to sell anything from my website yet.  But a woman found my website through a standard search for figure drawings, and she purchased and framed two of my gesture drawings for her dining room.  She sent me a photograph of the decor — it looks great, and I am so pleased that she found joanvienot.com!  My webmaster, Warren Tape, is going to set up a store for me on this website, to make it easy to purchase my art.  I will have to start producing “more-finished” pieces.  I know that landscapes are more likely to sell — not everyone is comfortable with nudes or partial nudes.

This week instructor Heather Clements set up a strong light source, which gave us deep shadows and brightly lit areas.  The model wore a bright purple bathing suit bottom, and a bright red top.  It was the perfect excuse to use some pure color in my drawings.  I used washable graphite and watercolor pencil for my final 3 drawings, from 15-minute and 20-minute poses.

But I had fun with the warm-up drawings too.  The immediacy of the gesture, the artist’s first impression of the forms or lighting in the figure, sometimes makes a more powerful statement than a finished drawing or painting.  Following are some of my drawings from the first hour of the session.
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Encaustic Workshop at Studio b. with Rae Broyles

I ventured into new territory today, taking a workshop on encaustic painting at Studio b.  The closest I had come to encaustic painting was when I was a child, melting crayons and drizzling the molten wax onto paper.  I don’t remember very much about my childhood experience, but I’m sure that what I loved most about it was playing with the candle.  Today we traded the candle for a blowtorch, which was infinitely more exciting!

First we used a paintbrush to put hot bees’ wax  onto the board to make a background, applying multiple layers, scraping each layer smooth.  Then we added pigment to the wax and brushed  colors on, building up textures, carving into the wax, cutting and scratching into it, stenciling, stamping, embossing, adding collage, and even writing  into the wax to create powerful, colorful 12″ x 12″ encaustic paintings.

Instructor Rae Broyles demonstrated many different ways to work the wax, and then she worked alongside us on a painting of her own.  We were surrounded by some of Rae’s recent work on the walls at Studio b.

With every medium, there is a craftsmanship that must be mastered before one can be freely expressive, but we all had a lot of fun trying, and we were all pretty successful, I think.  Part of it of course was Rae’s excellent instruction, but part too was her relaxed, and even playful, attitude.  After all, creativity often is playfulness.

I pressed a plant into the soft wax and then filled the embossing with colors, layering additional cover layers, so that some parts are in sharp focus and others appear to be further away.  I tried to put a fish in it, and he disappeared, and I decided I didn’t have enough control to put a small scuba diver in the background, which was my other idea for an underwater scene.   So it ended up being a picture of some kind of flowering plant.

For my second piece I wanted to experiment with a figure, and I used the general pose that we had at figure drawing last week, dividing the background with simple geometric shapes.  I tried making lines with a hot drawing tool, but that didn’t work very well, so I carved lines using a clay sculpting tool, and then filled the lines in with black wax, scraping off the excess.

Will I do more encaustic work?  Maybe so.  It’s fun, it forces me to accept looser, less-controlled expression, and all I would need to buy, that I don’t already have,  is an electric flat grill-pan to heat the wax in aluminum bread-tins.  (Oh, and I would need that neat trigger starter for the blowtorch, that was pretty cool.)

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Seeing in Black and White

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.

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Practicing with Horizontal Contours to Show Bulk

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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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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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 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...