Category Archive

My morning of drawing this week. I was enjoying the newsprint so much that I never moved on to charcoal paper. I like the smoothness and may try out some smooth white paper, like Bristol.

A few of the two-minute gestures:

Three seven-minute:

Two ten-minute–the second looks like watercolor to me, a nice effect I now want to try to recreate deliberately:

Twenty:

And 45, still not enough time this time:

Ooh was I having fun today. Here are the drawings I like best.

Something I’ve been trying to do is cut down on the range of tones. I can get lost in the jungle of an infinite variety of shades, fussing so much to get each one right that I lose the big picture and the passion. So I’ve been trying to go darker and leave white in places that do have subtle gradations of light and shadow.

On the other hand, when I use a broader range of grays, I can convey more about the light. With the longer poses I have time to do that. The light was so interesting in this one, but the drawing came out kind of messy and indefinite.

I like the light in this one best, which is probably why it’s my favorite for the day.

Faces are so tricky. This one was looking quite a bit like the model until I made just a couple more strokes. Now it doesn’t look like her at all:

Something amazing happened at drawing today. When we moved from the 1- and 2-minute gestures to the 7-minute poses, I just stayed in short-pose mode. I didn’t do it on purpose, but when I realized that was what I was doing, I stayed with it and was really happy with the results, especially with the last two. Usually, much as I try to think of every drawing as a completely disposable experiment, I shift into a “this is for real” mode when we start on the 7s. Keeping the energy of the fast, “just draw” intensity of the 1s and 2s, but having more time to get to all the details, was thrilling.

Here I decided I didn’t have enough time for the hands, after having to correct my proportions on the body and arms a couple times. Still, I like the energy:

This was the “AHHHHHH!” moment of the day, when I drew the face so that it really looks like her:

In this one I couldn’t get the face to look quite like hers, but it does look like a person’s. And I like the drawing overall. This pose was 45 minutes and that was almost enough.

Interestingly, I stopped pressuring myself to use the darkest charcoal, and actually started with the lightest on most of these, working all over and putting in subtler touches, then I used the medium, then the dark. Again, not a deliberate choice. There just seemed to be good things happening with the light charcoal; it didn’t feel tentative but alive, full of movement, and I wanted to keep that going.

The music might have helped. I liked it all, but I draw fastest and loosest to rock that I like, and we had David Bowie and Bob Dylan today. There’s no way I can draw slowly to “Hurricane.”

Along the way, I rediscovered the song “Space Oddity.” My introduction to it, at age 13, was eight weeks of just about daily doses (sometimes many times in a day), because I was at camp and one of my cabinmates was obsessed. It has made it a little hard to hear it for itself. Today I realized what an excellent song it is. The Bowie we were listening to was clearly a greatest hits compilation, but we almost always change the music at the rest breaks, and so we only heard 20 minutes of it. Just as well–I was already smokin’ and if “Suffragette City” had come on, I might have burned a hole right through my paper.

. . . which is a good reminder that progress isn’t linear (sigh). I’d learn more, though, if I looked at the previous week’s drawings before I went off to draw some more. They are the best reminders of what I’m doing that is and isn’t working.

With the above drawing, I grabbed my darkest charcoal and avoided getting bogged down in delicate shading. Quick, dark, high-contrast. Seven minutes doesn’t allow for much more (yet–I’m speeding up), which is good; and I know how hard it is for me to sustain energy while getting into detail. On the next drawing, I lost my nerve, used the medium charcoal, and got picky again, and it shows. It’s not a disaster–there is some good light on the thumb and fingers–but all in all the first drawing has more of the energy of the person modeling.

The most alive parts of the above are the elbow and the shadows cast by both arms.  I’m getting less intimidated by the subtlety of the contours of backs.

The first two drawings were on newsprint, but the above and those that follow are on paper with a lot of “bite” and texture. It is more forgiving when I make an unintentionally sharp edge: for example, on a shadow that actually fades into light more gently. On the newsprint, the sharpness will always show, but on this heavier, rougher paper it can be softened.

I don’t pay a lot of attention to composition in these sessions–I go by instinct and I don’t fuss if my composition gets messed up by my miscalculating how long the legs are or some such–but I like the composition on the above. Also, it’s an illustration of the importance of shadows. She would appear to just float if there weren’t those shadows anchoring her to the floor. That’s fine if you don’t want to evoke the space she’s in, but I do. I want to sense as I draw, and I want the viewer to sense, what she is feeling where her hand and arm and side touch the carpet. I didn’t realize that until I wrote it just now.

Back to the dark charcoal on the above, to good effect. I started to draw the face, also; it went all wrong; so I started again in the corner of the paper and drew the one that follows (you can see some of the gone-wrong face in the lower right). What success I had with this was due to keeping in mind what I try to remember when I’m drawing hands and feet: it’s just like the rest of the body, just pay attention and respond to what you see. (To misquote Annie Savoy from Bull Durham: “Drawing is like hitting a baseball. You’ve just got to relax and concentrate.”) There’s a freedom to this drawing that I’ve never achieved in a portrait before.

I’m happy with this last one because the hand and wrist convey a sense of the weight they’re supporting. It’s the first drawing I’ve made that I think is good enough to go into the future exhibit of hands that I sometimes think about putting up in the lobby at church.

Joy asked me recently if I were still finding figure drawing interesting. She knows I can be a little compulsive, and wanted to know if I would stop if I got tired of it. I will, but it’s hard to imagine when that could be. The subject is inexhaustible. Maybe if I were anything like satisfied with my ability to put on paper what I find so captivating, I’d move on to a different one. Maybe.

Today’s model was older than usual, which was a treat. Everyone’s living shows in their skin and faces and the way they hold their bodies, but I love the way experience shows in skin that’s become a little loose and tendons that have become more prominent. Of course, showing that kind of subtlety is beyond me, but it’s a pleasure to try. I’ve also ventured a little ways into the territory of faces in the past month or so, and did that here–with some success in the third drawing below, much less in another that I decided not to even post.

“How’d drawing go?” several family members asked me yesterday. The first half of the answer, I realized, is always the same–“Great”–because I’ve drawn for three hours and it always feels like exactly the way I want to spend a Monday morning. Answer 2a depends on how I like what I produced, and answer 2b depends on how much I learned. Answer 2a for yesterday is “eh.” Maybe by blogging a drawing-by-drawing journal entry I can learn enough to turn 2b into “great” too.

We started with the usual warmups, in which my only goal is to pay attention and keep working, and then this was the first 7-minute (A). Ugh ugh ugh. Stiff, proportions wrong, got lost in useless detail with hand.

7 minutes, A

Next 7-minute: ah! Now she looks alive. I kept looking back at this one for the rest of the morning to remind myself what I was going for: loose, spontaneous, responsive.

7 minutes, B

On the next two, however, I felt like I was being fiddly and had lost that eye for the light, and the sweep of the charcoal. D (the first 10-minute pose) has some good things going on in the elbow and the legs, but it also has me doing some of my clunkiest details with the wrinkles under the arm. My own arm felt stiff. (Sorry I can’t intersperse the photos the way I would like. They are below.)

On the second 10-minute pose (E) I got it again. This hand is the best thing I did all morning, especially because I find this model’s hands difficult. Hands are hands, you might think, but these are extra-challenging for me. I also like the shadows on her belly.

As I often do, I had intended to work dark, and I had backed off. Sheer timidity made it hard to pick up the soft (i.e., dark) charcoal. I kept starting with the medium one and planning to add darker shadows, then never getting around to it. On this next one (F) I got braver. Due in part to the darker shadows, something good happened with the light on the shoulder, back, and side, the kind of area that tends to be hard. I thought I got a little too fiddly again.  But in the next one (G), I also remembered to loosen up and work in broader strokes, and again I was much happier with it. I’m also inordinately proud of the half of the nipple ring I got to show. I don’t know where the other half went.

From a 2a standpoint, I ended with a whimper–I don’t like the product (H). Not enough time on the back, and a rush to sketch in the wrist in the last minute, so that I didn’t pay it enough attention and made it much thinner than it is. Most of my time went to the hand, that elusive hand, and I never managed to see the fourth finger right. Fussed over this and that detail of the hand, so that I never did capture the overall light and shadow, though the overall shape is okay. But it isn’t mostly about the product–so, 2b, what can I glean here to make the learning worthwhile? Work loose. Look for the light and shadows and put them in–just look how it worked back at that first 10-minute, with the right hand on the thigh drawn with few strokes. If I’d done that here, I might have missed a lot of detail but I’d probably have caught something of the feeling of her hand that is missing here: the weight pressing it down, the twist of the arm, the stretch between the thumb and finger.

No figure drawing until August 13, because I’ll be traveling in the Pacific Northwest, but I will get to use what I’ve learned.

C

D

E

F

G

H

The studio where I draw has a long-pose session every other Tuesday, but I can never go, since it’s a work day and invariably a busy one. Today, being on study leave, I could, so I had three hours of drawing yesterday and four today. I feel steeped in beauty and challenge.

Yesterday, I started with the intention of working dark, in high contrast, and without getting lost in detail as I am prone to do. My resolve weakened over the course of the morning. The later drawings are also longer poses, so I have the time to get into more detail on those, but I can see that I never went as dark even to start with. It was also the day of the unintentionally large hands. There’s stuff I like here, though.

Some of the drawings:

As usual, a mixed bag. Each of these has something about it that was successful. I’m encouraged by this, because I’m feeling stuck–like I keep doing the same things that aren’t working. So it’s good to remember that some things are working even so.

Some hands that are coming along:

I loved working on this hand, with its big ring and relaxed position. The finger the ring is on didn’t work right. The two on either side bend but it just looks, I don’t know, mangled. Fingers are almost like eyes: a few lines and shadows are enough to show their true shape; get one wrong by a little bit, and suddenly they are barely recognizable. And hands are almost as expressive as faces. I’ve been trying to sit up close so that even my increasingly myopic eyes can focus on the model’s hands without squinting, because they are still mostly what I want to draw. Although this one, Woman with Mangled Middle Finger, captures the overall expression of the pose too:

On this one, I knew as I drew the left arm that I was making it too short in order to fit everything on the page. I just couldn’t face starting on a new page at a smaller scale, or abandoning the attempt to get both hands in. Ah well, the focus of the drawing was really the two hands anyway, though I like the whole attitude of her upper body:

Nothing works here but the elbow, which I do like:

My aim in this one was to include both hands. The left one got short shrift and so came out flat. The right one, though, is a lesson to me in how few marks are needed to make the full shapes emerge. It’s quite minimal and yet it works, unlike the more elaborate shading on the forearm.

In desperation on a bad day, I really changed the kinds of marks I was making. That often helps, and in this case,  it had interesting results (if a somewhat more dramatic appearance than I really like), and loosened me up so that another good one was possible (the first drawing in this post, above). Maybe I should bring along pastels or pencils so that if nothing is going well, I can ditch the charcoal and try something really different.

On this one I made myself work fast. It was only a seven-minute pose but I really wanted her whole torso and that nice twist of her neck, so fast was the only option. I tend to fuss too much over details, so speed is a good antidote.

On this one some of the shadows on the back are way too dark and defined, but there is a light on the right shoulder that I was going for and got:

One thing I figured out after yesterday’s session, and after reflecting on what’s been hardest for me these past three sessions, is that I am working too big. Many of these sketches fill an 18×24 paper. I went in that direction in order to get into more detail in places, but it’s gone too far and seems to be making it harder to capture subtleties of light, not easier. Next week I’m going to scale it all back down, and that might be the change that bumps me out of this rut. I should probably cut the paper in half to help myself along.