Figure Drawing, maybe-NSFW edition

[metawidget]

Here are the promised drawings — everything I did on Friday, with some thoughts on how I made them and what I think of them. Click for somewhat larger lossless version.

I got started with some contour in a two-minute pose. Afterward, someone asked if I had been doing a blind contour. It wasn't actually my intention to do so.

Two tow-minute poses, still contouring but getting better with proportions and connecting my contours back to themselves. I like the legs here.

Another two two-minute poses — the legs are a standing pose, with the model holding a pillar for balance. For two minutes. Our model was going the distance, evidently. The study of her face turned out pretty nicely, too.

Heads are still tricky for me when not disembodied, it seems. This was the first five-minute pose, and I tried out some shading but this one didn't come together all that well — too boxy, not enough range of density, and the head looks out of place.

I contoured like crazy with my hunk of compressed charcoal (up to now, it's all conté pencil) and put in a bit of shading on this five-minute pose. I think it worked out pretty well. I decided to keep the compressed charcoal contours for many of the subsequent poses.

This one was the same technique and time, but a pose that was more fun for me.

This was actually more like three and a half minutes, because I ditched a start I didn't like. It's different and was lots of fun to do. People have darts and wedges all over the place, especially when lit for figure drawing. I'm not sure I realized that before Friday.

This one was hard for the model to hold for the five minutes (she was bending forward with arms out in almost a circle, and I was getting a little lost. It feels like a more nervous drawing than some of the others, and has its charm, I guess, but I don't think it really holds together.

I found that my conté pencil was too dull and scratchy sometime in here, and also that it's fatter than a normal pencil and doesn't fit the sharpener I borrowed, so there is some regular pencil in here with the conté and charcoal. It turned out pretty well anyway; I like that I built up a few levels of shading. This was our one ten-minute pose.

This one was an interesting pose — the model leaned her legs up against the pillar. I feel like this was my best embodied head of the evening, too. It was the first of three twenty-minute poses. The shadows on her back thigh were tricky; a bunch of light sources made for finicky shading. Also, it's amazing how many rolling hills there are in a human body when the person is lying right.

I kept going with the same technique, but I think I have to remember to be brave and start at least outlining the head early. Both bad heads result from trying to stick it in late in the pose. Be brave, self! Go for the head! The rest of the drawing is pretty successful, I think.

She crossed her fingers, giving many of the hand-phobic on my side of the room elevated blood pressure. I did what I hadn't done with the earlier heads and laid down a couple of shadows early to mark out where the hand was, and came back a few times to add detail. I think that paid off.

Comments

[popelaksmi]

Wow, good job. I admire you for going to the class and just doing it. (I don't know how much of it you've done before.) But I wish I could do that. Well, do it and not be completely awful at it. I think if I tried I'de be worse than Picasso.

[metawidget]

Also, as sassy_red_head noted in one of her blog posts, you need to give yourself permission to suck at first; I certainly did. I'm probably still worse than Picasso ;)

So if you want to try your hand at it, you can make sure nobody's standing behind you and just fight with the pencil for a while. It seems like a pretty encouraging community there, and it's $5 for two hours, so it's a small risk.

[popelaksmi]

Reading what I wrote in retrospect, I worry that I may not have made myself clear concerning my reference to Picasso. Some people think Picasso is a great artist, so being a little worse than Picasso one might infer they are still a very good artist.

What I meant was, in Picasso's style (Cubism?), one might not always be able to tell where a limb, nose or épaulette start. I think if I tried to draw I might be same but in a good Cubist way. :p

I'll have to think about the idea of giving oneself permission to suck at first. I like the idea yet fear it a bit as well. And I like your idea of drawing with no one behind me. I'll definitely give it some thought. Thank you.

[metawidget]

Thanks, I enjoyed doing them and sharing them with DW/LJ-land!

My DEC and undergraduate degrees had fine-arts components (so I was doing various sorts of studio art (mostly printmaking) pretty regularly until 2004 or so), but my last figure drawing session must've been in 1997. I think I must've kept a bit of ingrained memory from then :)

[popelaksmi]

P.S. how did you manage to scan your drawing to get them online?

[metawidget]

I got them out on the porch in full sun and photographed them straight down from about 5 feet directly above. It was a little tricky to keep shadows out of the frame, but it worked. I suppose it's worth noting that they're all on 18-by-24-inch paper (I think I mentioned that in the other entry), so scanning was right out.

[sabotabby]

Very expressive. Man, I miss figure drawing.

[metawidget]

Aw, thanks! I hope you can find a way to get a figure-drawing fix soon, if you want it.

[wisewomanjudith.livejournal.com]

The comments and drawings are really interesting together.

You're multi-dimensional!

[metawidget]

Thanks! I think the narrative of how I got my drawing-brain back over the night is what makes this post more LiveJournal than DeviantArt. The presence of nipples, of course, makes it more LJ than Facebook :)

[sassy-red-head.livejournal.com]

For the crossing fingers pose, on the front side she was doing a 'shhhhh' with her finger at her lips. I learned that looking at Shawn's drawing of the pose the next day.

[metawidget]

I think she had fun (at that pose and most of the others). I hope she models again some Friday.