Osher Figure Drawing with Model David

We had a wonderful exploration of the skeletal structure last Friday with model David.  For a warm-up, David posed with a life-sized resin skeleton we have affectionately named "Skelly Bones."

I asked my students to take the first minute of the 3-minute pose to lay in a stick drawing for David's skeletal structure in one color, then draw a loose gesture over top of that structure with a contrasting color for the remaining time.

Though I didn't draw Skelly Bones, David set up the skeleton to mirror his own pose for each of the standing gestures, and this guided us through the structure in David's form.

After the gestures, we moved on to study the legs, and practiced with laying in the structure, then making a gesture drawing, checking our measurements, and adding a bit of shading and detail, like the toenails.

We finished up with the long pose.

Many thanks to David for filling in on a snow day when our scheduled model couldn't get to the farm studio!

Osher Figure Drawing with Model Amelia

This week's focus of study was dealing with the challenge of foreshortening.  We warmed up with Amelia taking contrapposto standing poses for us-- the classic standing twist. By drawing with a continuous line, we could explore interior and exterior contours, and with our drawing implement always in contact with the paper, we could spend more time looking at Amelia and less at our paper.

We moved on to 4-minute wrapped-line drawings.  Rather than following the outer contours of Amelia's form, we imagined we were mapping the path of an ant crawling back and forth across Amelia, and so created a contour drawing.  This technique helps to understand the landscape of a foreshortened limb.

Amelia's final gesture of the series was quite foreshortened, giving us a great opportunity to test what we had been practicing.

We moved on to a 15-minute study of foreshortening -- the challenge of drawing a limb coming directly towards us.

We finished the class with a long pose of about 50 minutes (with breaks of course), and incorporated foreshortening into the pose as well as interesting background elements. 

Many thanks to model Amelia for a fantastic session with amazing contrapposto poses!

The Beauty of Limitations: Recent Gouache Paintings

I recently was inspired to try gouache after seeing some original paintings by Pittsburgh artist Joan Brindle at the Irma Freeman Center for Imagination.  Her rich colors and lush landscapes drew me in.  I admired the way that she used repeated strokes in water ripples and grass stalks. 

I pulled out my 5 tubes of Winsor & Newton gouache: Burnt Umber, Burnt Sienna, Cobalt Blue, Cadmium Yellow Pale & White.

I laid a 3 x 3 grid over a reference photo, and cropped the image until I got a pleasing composition. After making a quick pencil sketch, I began painting.  

The limited palette would seem like a hindrance, but it turned out to be an artistic advantage.  I mixed the paint to match as close as I could to what I saw, but with only five colors, exact color matches weren't possible.  How freeing to know I couldn't be perfect, so I could focus on getting close enough.  

The resulting paintings had a wonderful feeling of unity and harmony due to the narrow color palette.  And because gouache is opaque, I could paint light colors over darker colors.  

The white clouds in the November scene above were created by leaving the paper unpainted, then adding shadows, but the light colored grasses along the roadway were painted over the green. I liked the effect of repeated grass strokes in pale yellow, green and indigo blue.

An autumn color scene.

Summertime goldenrods along the fence with the neighbors' cowpasture.

An Anglewing butterfly from a reference photo by Brad Silberberg.

A Canada Goose in winter from a reference photo by Brad Silberberg.

A new medium changes how we see possibilities, and gives us a new venue to express our creativity.

Osher Figure Drawing with Kathryn

We had a wonderful first class of the semester on Friday with model Kathryn.  We began with 2-minute mass gesture drawings.

I invited my students to turn their charcoal on its side and make broad strokes to express the masses within Kathryn's form.  I find this technique a good way to warm up at the beginning of a term.  It also helps us to explore the structure within the body rather than just looking at outside contours.

We added a minute to the gesture poses, and included some contours and shadows to bring definition to our drawings.

Then we changed gears to a more abstract approach, and chose 5 lines to represent Kathryn's 1-minute poses.

Now that we were warmed up, we worked on some longer studies.

It was wonderful to be back to drawing, and to have Kathryn's fantastic poses to keep us creating!