Another drawing from the Frederick group. This was done on a rather large sheet of heavy printing (22″ x 30″) that is normally used for printing presses. It makes for great drawing paper since it can take lots of erasures without ripping, which is what I did here. I first lightly rubbed in the figure using a chamois cloth, built up the shapes with charcoal and then erased back for the highlights, repeating this over and over until the form was built up. It takes quite a while to get in a solid black area which you can see in the leg’s shadow and behind the model’s shoulder. Somehow these two dark areas seem to pin the figure down so it look partially that she is trying to roll to one side and partially is being held back which makes for some interesting tension.

breasts hands thighs

A drawing done in pencil on textured paper  at the Frederick drawing group. I wasn’t happy with the pose at first. The model’s head, arms, chest, and thighs were lined up horizontally and seemed quite static and unexpressive. But I found that the pose’s simplicity allowed me to focus on details like the soft shadows  and on each finger. Something about the angularity of the hand in contrast with the sensuality and roundness of the breast and thighs makes it look like it is from a different planet, but then maybe hands are.

seated female nude, leg extended

crouching female nude. leg extended

More figure drawing from Frederick. It seems that I am settling on a technique that I can apply to future figure drawing. For the quick 5-minute poses, like the one on the right, I use an ink pen. Using ink forces you to think fast, since every mark you make is permanent and cannot be erased. Then for the long hour poses, like the one on the left, I use a graphite or charcoal pencil and use a lot of cross hatching to build up the shadow areas. Cross hatching is slow but allows you to change your mind as you work. It is a little bit like sculpting, I think, chipping away at the paper, until the form is revealed.

female nude, arms wrapped around knee

female nude, crouching on stool

More figure drawing with the open figure drawing studio in Frederick. The model was new, at least to me, but seemed to understand that modeling is more than just sitting still but about finding a pose that can challenge the artist. I found that small gestures this model made, like  the arm wrapped  hugging tightly around the shoulders or the way the foot bent backwards on the stool, made each pose unique. I started with these areas and slowly worked out from there.

Alas! Poor Yorrick

nude male, back view, head leaning against wall

I went back to figure drawing last night at the weekly drawing group that meets in Frederick, MD. Clayton Myer (www.claytonmyer.com) was the model. There was a plastic skull laying around the studio and we posed him in this contemplation of age and death. While we drew, Clayton regaled us with stories of his acting career and the time he played a boxer in an indie film.

Steel Canyons

This is a rather large piece (40″ x 30″) that was based on a photograph which I used previously for a small sketch (see January 5th).I find these larger canvases a challenge to keep the whole thing holding together. With smaller canvases, I have a feel for the whole thing, maybe because you can see everything at the same time  when working at arm’s length. But with a larger canvas, the work needs to be done piecemeal. In this case, I first worked on the buildings, then on the foreground, then on the sky, etc. but rarely worked on the piece as a whole. There a quite a few layers here as I tried to work out the kinks in the composition. Though the original photograph has a river in the foreground, during the painting process, the river dried out and a figure appeared, who seems to be looking up at the city spread out before him with amazement and some dismay. The painting seemed to demand a more illustrative approach in order to tell this story.

A head and shoulders portrait drawn from life. After a few quick 3-5 minute poses the model takes a pose for the rest of the session, often an hour and a half. That gives a lot of time for erasing and correcting the drawing but also a lot of time to overwork the thing. I basically knew when I started this that I wanted to focus on the model’s head. Specifically the shape of the head interested me. The model has a military background and the bearing and  close cropped hair that goes with that. But he also is an devotee of yoga, which I thought gives him a sense of peaceful strength. I saw this long narrow paper in pads at the art supply store. It forces you to think a little different about the figure because so much of it will be cropped off. But in some ways it is easier. Anything you do on it is going to be interesting.

Frederick Figure Drawing

One of the areas I am focusing more on recently is figure drawing. On Tuesday nights I join a group of artists in downtown Frederick while my wife attends classes at nearby Hood College. It is a great atmosphere in a large, classic unfinished attic in a turn-of-the-century building. I feel somewhat that I have been transported a century ago to Paris and that we are all wild bohemians; Picasso or Matisse could be joining us at any minute. Figure drawing is challenging because once you try for a likeness your have to keep your proportions somewhat accurate throughout the entire drawing. I taped two pieces of paper together for this drawing. It is much easier to get the feel of the entire figure when you can freely move you hand around in large gestures.

Artist at Work

After finishing a drawing I tape it to the wall of my studio to let it sit around for a while. It takes a while for the true worth of a work to come through. You have to forget the reasons you originally chose to do it and let is stand on its own right. One thing I found interesting about this drawing and  on one thing you can’t see on this website is the size of it. I drew this self-portrait on large paper and the head is about 50% larger than mine is in real life. (Insert joke about my big head here.) I noticed that almost all of the drawings I felt worthy of keeping were also larger than life by about the same percentage. Somehow this takes the object out of the realm of reality and gives it a meditative quality, as if it looms closer to you and floats some where off the wall. Something like that.  An idea worth looking into.

I have been painting lately I swear! It’s just that I don’t have anything in the stage where I want to show it quite yet. I did attend a recent open figure drawing studio and produced these 20-minute sketches on water color paper using a water-soluble pencil. It’s a great idea. Just do a quick sketch, take a water soaked brush and voila! you have something that looks almost like a real painting. Not more building up graduated layers with pencil strokes. Funny how I kept cropping off the models head. What is that all about?