The Very Model …

After my co-op recently stopped offering portrait nights, I started going to a couple of our figure drawing nights, instead.

I am very thankful for the many opportunities I’ve had to draw from a live, nude model, dating back to my latter years of high school.  Call me an art elitist, but there seem few ways to gain the same understanding of the human form that can replace drawing from living, breathing, moving man or woman in the flesh.  How many of you have had the chance?  What did it do for you?

This night at the co-op, we started with some really quick one or two-minute poses, to get warmed up.  I did the first few on one sheet of paper:

I like the little brown figure, and there’s some hints of good stuff in the green leg.

Here’s a more fully realized watercolor drawing:

The focus is on proportion and balance,  You’ll notice that although it’s done in pink watercolor, it’s still essentially a line drawing, with little attention paid to lights and shadows, and even less to actual color.

Later on in the session, after completing a longer pose (which I’ll post soon) I followed it up with a few studies of the face and hand:

The purpose of these was to gain additional insight into ways of depicting the forms – to find the more universal principles of the forms rather than copying the individual characteristics of the features in front of me.  It was about building on skills and adding to an understanding so that I can re-create these things from my imagination without having to observe the objects in real life as much in the future.

How do you make a hand that looks very “hand-like”?  Sometimes the answer to that question is different from drawing a very realistic hand.  Hmmmm…..