These are from the long-pose session, which consists of 1- and 2-minute warmups, then a 20-minute pose and then one pose held for almost three hours (with breaks, obviously). Here’s the 20-minute drawing:

Here’s the long pose, about 70 minutes of drawing:

My favorite part is probably her right hand, though it is just a tad large. Also the light on her left leg (the one underneath), especially because I sweated over that section, thinking it was just going to look like a very skinny leg, but when I stepped back at a break, the alchemy had worked. I’m happy enough about the whole thing that I wish I had done it on better paper. It is my usual newsprint. I meant to use better paper but only had much smaller sheets.

I generally leave off faces because drawing the face will probably require as much time as the rest put together, and I want to focus on the rest of the body. Since we had so much time, I meant to incorporate her face, but just couldn’t make her whole body fit on the paper. I do an overall very sketchy sketch to fit in what I want to fit in, but when I worked in detail, I started from the feet and the body just grew a little beyond the scale I started with; the feet kept looking too small, even though I looked again and again and could not quite figure out where I had gone wrong. Anyway, it didn’t leave room for her head. So I did just a portrait, about 15 minutes:

I seem to have cut off the top of her head slightly. Sorry about that, dear model–guess I got spooked by the corner and didn’t work right to the edge. Something about the way I photographed this (too much daylight?) wiped all the color out of it. It is actually on orange paper. This was my first serious try at hair oh, probably since my first semester of college, when I discovered how hard it was to draw hair realistically and gave up. Maybe I will devote a few sessions to hair, the way I have done to hands, but it’s hard to get as interested in it.

It’s a good thing I can’t draw twice in a week very often. Michael bakes cake for the long break every session, and it’s hard to resist, especially after smelling it for the first hour and a half. Yes, cake. Here’s the link to the studio again.

Advertisement