Wednesday, May 28, 2008

FDW - Sessions 3

[Update] Forgive the quality. Phone pictures for now. A number of good disasters in the mix. Something about this model's legs it was really easy for me to exaggerate the length of them.













Todays session was nice. The model was male and slender with a well defined muscular build. Very easy to see his structure which created nice shadows as well. He did wild poses, very spread out, legs every which way and arms flailing about. These poses made for challenging drawings at times. At others times it helped because there were such clear cross sections or easily definable negative spaces.

I attempted to recreate the technique from Ron Lemen's speed video posted down below. Using some vine charcoal it was refreshing to do those bold simplified marks. I found that once they were there they acted as a guide for my eyes and I could easily stray from or cut into those them to help define the actual shape. And that foundation line has a lot of strength and confidence too which keeps the under structure feeling more chiseled into space. I'll still need a lot more practice at it but I could already tell that it was beneficial.

I've also been trying to slow down a bit. I tend to be too fast. My speed helps me spot proportion issues quickly but then I speed on through to the shading (which then looks sloppy) when I could be spending more time on proper structure. If the structure is good, the rest of the drawing will hold up. I need to drill this into my head more. Just like thumbnails; if the composition is good, the larger piece will retain the same relation of positive and negative shapes.

Turnout at FDW was pretty large today, around 12 people I believe. Devon (sp) has been a regular there lately and is a tester from Midway. From what I see of his drawings he's really trying to get down the arcs of the poses by focusing mainly on silhouette shape making. I'd like to take some pictures of Devon, Tae, and Marko's work to post up here in the neat future.

Tomorrow I plan to do some exercise in drawing form from the Loomis book Figure Drawing for all its Worth. My drawings from session 3 were large, I'm not able to scan them in nor do I have a camera. I'll try and figure something out though.

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