More Colorist's Value Studies of the Figure

In Friday's Osher class, David was our model, and it felt so good to have a model in the studio, even though I was drawing off the monitor like my students. David gave us creative gesture poses, and a lovely long pose, and he set up the lights to provide us with lots of gorgeous shadows.

We did studies of legs and feet, but with a playful twist.  I demonstrated my approach of looking for highlights, midtones, moderate shadows & deep shadows, and assigning a different color to each tone.  Instead of trying to represent familiar body parts, this approach invites you to capture shadow shapes, which I find freeing.  I had an especially good time discovering the little negative space shadows between the toes in this drawing.

During the gesture poses, I focused on capturing the masses of David's body in the first minute, then took the final 2 minutes to seek out contour lines and shadows.