Electric Spaghetti Figure Drawing with Model David

My Osher Figure Drawing class has covered some interesting ground this semester -- from charcoal and pastel drawings to upside-down drawings, to creating "Electric Spaghetti" collaborative gestures through the Annotation function on Zoom.  

My students experienced a burst of creativity and excitement with last week's "Collaborative Neon Gestures," so I repeated the activity.  David took the pose, I gave the start cue, and magically, colorful lines started piling up within & on David's form. We paused, and David took another pose, complementary to the first, and the electric spaghetti lines completed the composition.

This week, some of my students expanded into drawing features and shadows.  In this time of isolation, connecting with each other in a collective drawing felt like victory.  And a refreshing way to play.

We changed gears back to using paper and charcoal for gesture warm ups before taking on the challenge of drawing David in a long pose.

And the final project was a long drawing using the subtractive method.  The pose provided a solid challenge  -- heavy foreshortening, drawing the face, hands and feet, and capturing dimensions with shadows and highlights --and a way to practice what we'd been studying the last 5 weeks.  

Stepping back from my drawing, I felt I should add in a lute and a lion to this composition, to create a male version of Henri Rousseau's "The Sleeping Gypsy."  

It was lovely to be swept away for an hour to just focus on drawing David and discovering where that drawing process led me.