We had a wonderful class yesterday with model Kathryn. She inspired us with her gorgeous, dancerly gesture poses with our plastic skeleton Mr. Skellybones. Seeing her poses next to Mr. Skellybones, we could consider the underpinnings of her form.
Always a delight when your model has a sense of playfulness! Kathryn interacted with our life-sized skeleton replica in her 3-minute gestures. I began with a quick skeletal gesture in white and added contours around that.
We moved on to study drawing the head and face, and took 15 minutes to create a portrait of Kathryn.
My students love the long pose, and Kathryn gave us lovely inspiration with a her seated twist. Her lime-green sari wrap looked lovely against her pale, rosy skin.
Many thanks to model Kathryn for her amazing work!
Kathryn kicked off our first session of Osher summer Figure Drawing Friday, July 2nd with fantastic poses full of energy and creativity.
It felt good to be back to drawing Kathryn, and we focused on gestures to start.
I asked my students to use a soft medium like charcoal or pastels. By turning the charcoal chunk on its side, we could capture large areas of mass rather than focusing directly on contour lines.
As we warmed up, we added a few select lines to our mass gestures.
Kathryn told a story from her childhood about collecting spring water in gallon jugs tied to each end of a pole and crossing a creek. A flood had washed out the bridge so that all that was left were steel beams. She said she and her siblings had to balance carefully as they crossed.
For her final mass & line gesture pose, Kathryn gave us this dramatic fall into the creek!
We moved on to 5-Line poses, simplifying each pose into 5 strokes. It forced us to observe carefully before drawing.
Kathryn's skill as a model showed in the way she selected poses to create beautiful lines that suited the 5-Line format.
We finished up with longer poses. The late morning sun shone in our east window, casting a lovely blue light behind Kathryn. This only occurs around midsummer, so I made a point to draw it in with pastel.
We finished the class with a 30-minute pose reminiscent of Manet's Olympia.
Hiring a professional academic figure model to pose for your class provides depth and creative spark to inspire your students.
Our semester of Osher classes finished Friday with a fantastic duo modeling session. Kathryn and David brought us beautifully interactive poses. We started with 2-minute gesture drawings focused on blind-drawing the negative space between and around Kathryn & David.
When you draw two models at once, the complexity can be overwhelming. Looking at negative spaces provides an entry point to simplify the process and get you warmed up.
We moved on to 5-minute gesture drawings focused on capturing the two figures in action. Each pose told a story, expressed emotion, and caught us artists up in the excitement of capturing all we could on paper.
We finished with a lovely tableau for about an hour and a half (with model breaks).
As an artist, you never know which days you will feel "on" and which days your drawings will fall flat. Friday's class was one of those magical days when the models brought an inspiring performance, and my art came alive. I still have the drawings propped in my studio for admiration.
Many thanks to Kathryn & David for this amazing session!
I taught my first class of the Spring semester yesterday, and model Kathryn Zapalo joined us in the studio. It was fabulous to work in person with a model again, and to have Kathryn's bright energy to inspire us all. My students created beautiful works! You can see their drawings on the Osher class page of my blog here.
To warm up, we started with simple mass gestures, drawing with the side of our charcoals.
Then we switched gears and created abstract, 5-Line gesture drawings.
And, we finished up with a 15-minute pose, and a 40-minute pose.
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 like to present different ways to approach figure drawing in my Osher class, so that we don't fall into the tedium of one known -- yet rutted -- way to draw the human form. Friday, I suggested my students join me in using a brush and ink or paint to capture Kathryn's lively gestures.
How freeing to let the brush's sweep follow Kathryn's contours! She gave us a series of elegant, powerful, dancerly poses, ideal for the medium.
We moved on to tackling the challenges of drawing hands & feet. I presented two different ways to look at capturing these intricate parts -- a gestural approach and a more blocky technique I call "Robot Hands." Below are my brush paintings.
Gestural Hands:
Robot Hands!
I used a combination of both techniques in the feet. I think I got too excited about drawing toes, because they grew larger on my page than in reality!
I was enjoying the freshness of the brush and black paint, so I created two different versions of Kathryn's long pose. The bold strokes of the brush produced high contrast images, with a few light washes for shadows. The brush seemed to have a mind of its own, creating stylized images I didn't expect like this:
I noticed that the new medium inspired my students, too. These gray winter months, anything fresh feels like spring!
