Collaborative Neon Gestures with Model Kathryn

After nearly a year of teaching figure drawing via Zoom, I keep trying to find new ways to inspire and instruct.  This week, inspiration came from Carnegie Mellon University Drawing Professor, Narelle Sissons, whose class I observed as David modeled.  Narelle asked her students to capture the shapes within David's form, and invited each to outline them using the Zoom Annotate function.

I loved the neon result, and decided to put this technique to use in our Osher class.  My students took to this approach like ducks to water!

 After the first few, I tried having Kathryn pose with herself.  She would take the first pose to one side, the students would sketch colorfully, then I would ask Kathryn to move to the second pose.

 By looking at her computer monitor, she could line up her second pose to complement her first.  The students sketched in shapes and found contours, and we collaboratively completed the composition.

After our virtual gesture drawing, we drew a quick gesture drawing in the same style on paper to warm our sketching hands up.

We moved on to the long pose, using a piece of drawing paper with vine charcoal rubbed in to create a toned paper (see video link below for instructions).  

We lifted out the highlights with a kneaded eraser, sketched in shadows with vine charcoal, and finalized our work with compressed charcoal and charcoal pencils.

The lovely bit about using this method is that if you ever want to change anything, the vine charcoal is easy to rub out --or to add back in, if you want to darken an area you erased out.

My finished drawing:

Here's the video describing how to prepare a piece of drawing paper for the subtractive method of drawing:

I recommend you give it a try!