Big, Bold, and Beautiful

Since the semester is almost over I thought I’d update everyone on my drawing progress for class.

Drawing has been pretty intense lately but still going well. Since my last blog about drawing we covered a lot of different topics. We did a very long drawing of drapery to learn how to draw cloth so when we draw clothed figures it’s easier. We did faces, or portraits, and had to do a self portrait which was not as hard as I expected it to be. And right now we’ve been doing gesture and figure drawings of nude models.

This is my drapery drawing. It was one of those pieces that eventually I felt like the more I worked on it the worse it got. I’m pretty happy with it overall now though, and I honestly don’t know what I would do to fix it at this point.

My teacher was pretty happy with it but she said it has a softness to it that, though it works, the drawing may have worked with some parts being more rough.

I think that is something of my style now; to make things look soft.

This is my self portrait and the same softness appears in this. I started with just the head and no gradated background, as well as several things that needed fixing such as the hair. But when I showed it in our class critique, they all suggested I gradate the background to balance out the image since I made the head so small in comparison to the paper. I think it really helped and I’m quite happy with the final product.

What surprised me about this one was how much my teacher liked it. She said that though some of the facial features aren’t quite right the drawing as a whole does the best job of creating an atmosphere and it’s really nice. She also said I look like Scully from The X Files in this, which I can see.

I was really worried about doing a self portrait since I’m not great at faces anyway and doing your own face is supposed to be very difficult, so I’m quite pleased with how it turned out, and of course I’m very happy that my teacher likes it.

This is one of my many nude figure drawings. Right now it’s the only one completely finished. I’m very happy with the body, especially how the skin came out. I feel like it really looks like skin in most places.

The face is alright, not great. The face kind of bothers me, along with the hair. Both of which though didn’t need to be included in this particular drawing, we were focusing on the torso and were allowed to crop as necessary, but still.

I exaggerated certain things, mainly the ribs, on purpose to show the musculature of the body, which we’ve also been focusing on heavily in class.

Whenever I tell someone we’re drawing nude models they always ask “Isn’t that awkward?” So I’m going to tell everyone: No, it isn’t.

When you have a nude model in class, for the most part, they don’t talk. Not a big surprise sine they’re trying to stay still for long periods of time. At least for me, because they’re not talking, I almost forget they’re people. I know that sounds terrible but after you’ve been staring at someone for about half-an-hour you just think of them as still life, probably because you’re doing all the same things that you do for a still life drawing, the only difference is that every so often the still life has to get up and stretch.

Also, being able to draw a real nude person is so much better than having to work off of a picture. We had a homework assignment where our teacher gave us a packet of nude figures but told us that if we could get a model to do it. I started drawing from the packet and then found out that not one, but two, of my friends would be willing to pose for Cesley and myself. It was much easier and went faster with a model. I think the main reason is that the model is closer and there for close up and than a Xeroxed handout making certain details much easier to see.