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I’m tempted to make this look better-proportioned than it is by splitting it in two and passing it off as two drawings.  I got lost in the detail, as I do with hands, and didn’t realize until afterwards that I’d drawn her right hand so much larger than the left that they look like they’re from two different people.  It’s okay. Good things are happening.

I couldn’t find my pencils as I was leaving for drawing this week, so I only had the box of assorted charcoals the studio has on hand, which doesn’t include any charcoal pencils.  I’m sure I could have borrowed one from someone, but I liked the challenge of doing without one.  I like this drawing because it gets into more fine detail than I’ve ever created without a pencil.

All 7-minute drawings, all charcoal and charcoal pencil as usual. It was hard to pick a focus on a lot of this session’s poses–the overall shapes of his poses were beautiful–but I forced myself to choose a section so that I’d be able to get into some detail.

(c) Anderson—Alinari/Art Resource, New York

(c) Giraudon/Art Resource, New York

Who’s easier to draw, men or women? At the first break on Monday, the man next to me and I discussed it. He thought men were easier–“more obvious,” and added that the Greeks found men more aesthetically interesting. I wondered whether that was because they liked all that visible muscle–it gives you more to grab onto (may I stress: artistically speaking). Of course, they loved to sculpt athletes. Did Greek women do sports in ancient times? He thought yes. I don’t think it worked its way into their ideal of female beauty.  Even allowing for the fact that female athletes seldom develop the pronounced muscles that men do, Atalanta, on the right here, doesn’t really have a runner’s legs.

All of this musing was inspired by the new model. The studio’s been low on male models for a while, but this man started working this week, and he’s excellent. I wouldn’t call it easier, but it was a change and an interesting challenge. Last week’s weren’t that good, and having the rush of first-time readers due to the Freshly Pressed plug was like having all these people dropping by and me in curlers. So here are some from this Monday, a somewhat better hair day.

10-minute, including a rare foray into faces:

20-minute:

It was an art-filled three-day weekend. My big Christmas gift to Joy was a weekend workshop at the Institute of Mosaic Art in Oakland, coordinated with my Wonderful In-Laws so that they took care of Munchkin and we could take the class together. Joy had already taken a mosaic workshop in San Miguel, with results that you can see here. This was my first go at it–another art form, like quilt, collage, and assemblage, that makes things out of other, often broken, things–and I could see myself seriously getting into this medium. I can’t show the results, because our digital camera is broken and putting a 12″x12″ concrete stepping stone on my scanner would probably be a bad idea.

Then I had my figure drawing session on Monday as usual. I can’t miss it every time Joy and the munchkin have Monday off, so off I went while they had a nice morning at home together. I wanted to get a four-mile walk in, which means a circuitous route to the studio since it’s only about 2 miles away. Unsure how hilly the route I’d planned was, I left much more time than I needed, and with over half an hour to spare, I went to Arizmendi, the fantastic worker-owned bakery that has recently opened in the Mission District, and over my second breakfast, thought about what I wanted to do differently in the day’s session. The previous two sessions, I hadn’t liked my drawings much. I decided on a few approaches: be bolder with shading, especially making sure to put in all the small variations in surface; get back to putting in a dark background where that was what made an edge stand out, rather than inventing a line that wasn’t there; focus on just one part of the body with each drawing; and above all be brave. It ended up being a good session.

Another change I made was to bring some sketch-grade paper, which has a rougher texture than the newsprint I’ve been using. I don’t know if it deserves the credit for yesterday’s improvements, but I like the way it grabs the charcoal, and it feels like an achievement to draw on nice white paper without seizing up from a fear of mistakes.

I’ll post one or two drawings a day instead of one big gallery, so here are two, ten minutes each. The second one here is probably my favorite from the day–I like the shading on the belly and thighs.

The first drawing (shown here in two parts) is probably my favorite since I started going to the 23rd Street Studio last fall. The shadow running across her left leg and foot is too sharp, and there are a dozen other places where something isn’t quite right. But the belly and right thigh represent a breakthrough. Those expanses of skin where there isn’t much going on in the way of dramatic contours or shadows are hard for me; I have tended just to skip over them in the past, not quite able to capture, or even see, the subtleties of the light there. But the more I draw, the more I can see them, and show them, and this time it worked pretty well.

Click on an image to see the larger version.

I missed drawing last week because Joy and Munchkin had the day off and we had plans together. As it turned out, I was too sick to do anything but sleep.

I went in today focused on how to use the whole range from white to black with sufficient transitions in between. A rare glitch with a model meant we only had time for five drawings aside from the warmup gestures; here are the first three.

(Click on thumbnail to see larger version)

These are the only other three from last week that I like enough to post. On (e), the only really successful part was the hat, so I cropped it to that detail.

I’m pushing myself to go darker with the blacks, and the result is a kind of florid appearance that I dislike, as in (g) here. I’m trying to figure out what I did in the drawings where I went dark and had plenty of contrast but not that florid appearance. Why is (h), the one on the right, a success and (g), the one in the middle, is not?

Another day when I felt like I wasn’t hitting a groove, but now that I look at these, especially the third one, I think I actually did. It has a subtlety of shading I’ll have to study again before next time. That won’t be next Monday, because Joy and Munchkin have the day off, so it will be a family day.

This past Monday’s was definitely a session when I did not seem to be able to make the kind of marks I wanted to.  The charcoal seemed either too hard or too soft, which may have been true, as I was using some different charcoal than usual, and/or the too-hardness and too-softness might have been in the hand.  And yet hand and charcoal and model did connect in that torso of (c).  Moments of grace.