Osher Figure Drawing with Model Sophia

Friday, November 19th, we had a wonderful session with model Sophia.  An incredibly inventive and flexible model, Sophia created gesture poses that stretched our abilities and strengthened our drawing and observational skills.

During the gestures, I asked my students to spend the first minute of each three minute pose looking for the underlying structure of Sophia's body. We used one color for the structure, capturing Sophia's spine, her rib cage, her skull and other bones.  With two minutes remaining in the sketch, I called for a color change and we chose a contrasting color for the outer contours and shadows, building upon the armature we had laid down in the first minute.

Sophia's last pose was so abstract that it pushed our observation and drawing skills, and was a valuable workout.

All warmed up, we moved on to practicing drawing faces.  I demonstrated the process of finding the shape of a person's head, laying in the eye line about halfway down the face, drawing the eyes, and then measuring where the nose and lips fit in.  

We finished up with a long pose that incorporated our study of Sophia's face.  I used pastels on blue Canson Mi Teintes paper, and followed my intuition on color choices within Sophia's figure and in the negative space.

Many thanks to model Sohia for an amazing session full of inspiration and discovery!