Drawing in the Museum: Discovery Basecamp

We spent our final class in an area designed for children and classes -- Discovery Basecamp. The area provided plentiful seats and taxidermied birds and mammals in lightweight plexiglass boxes.

In short, the perfect environment for drawing natural history specimens up close.

And surprisingly few toddlers and preschoolers rambled through while we were sketching.

Near Discovery Basecamp we explored an exhibit entitled The Art of the Diorama.  That's where I fell in love with this Northern Raven and drew its portrait.

During the cold, gray days of winter, a museum is a wonderful place to sit and sketch.  And to stretch your legs.  The walk between exhibits, to different floors, etc. is both beautiful and healthful.  I enjoyed having room to roam without slipping on ice!

Happy Creating!

Osher Figure Drawing -- Portraiture with Model Robin

 An impromptu visit from my best friend, Robin, intersected with an ice storm that kept my scheduled portraiture model from being able to travel to my home studio, and the result was a wonderful class on drawing the face and head.

My dear friend stepped in to fill the gap, and we began with 1 minute gestures of the structure of Robin's head in various different poses -- looking up, looking down, presenting profile and front-on views.

We then took 2 minutes to create more developed gesture drawings of just Robin's head and neck, refining our sketches and adding in more details.

My final 2-minute drawing was beginning to look more like Robin.

I demonstrated how to draw the face and head in more detail including the placement of the features, and studies of each in the front-on view and in profile.

We finished up the session with a long pose of about an hour.

Many thanks to my dear friend, Robin!

Osher Figure Drawing with Model David

Friday morning, model David put us through our paces with his advanced gesture pose series. He began with a standing pose to let us get our bearings.

Then he began to creatively complicate the poses.

After he warmed us up a bit, David began throwing inventive poses with heavy foreshortening and unusual perspectives.  He said that these were poses he did for the more advanced students to challenge them to up their game, like this "shipwrecked" pose.

These curled up poses forced us to trust our eyes as we drew, and David quoted one of our favorite college drawing instructors who advised his students to, "Let your hand be an obedient servant of your eyes."

His poetic words rang true and helped us to focus on the process rather than the product.

 

We moved on to study drawing the feet.  A 15-minute pose gave us time to study the structure of the feet. For the first 3 minutes of the pose, I had David wear footie socks to hide any details of his feet.  We blocked in the shapes we saw, and then David took off the socks so we could finish our drawings with details.

We finished the session with an hour long pose (with model breaks). I used a 9XXB pencil on Charcoal paper.

Many thanks to model David for his creativity, inspiration and dedication to teaching the art of figure drawing!

Osher Figure Drawing with Model Emily

We had a wonderful session studying foreshortening with model Emily last Friday.  We began with 3-minute gestures following Emily's structure.

Once we were warmed up, we approached foreshortening in the gestures through wrapped line drawings.  

I described wrapped line drawings to my students as tracing the path of an ant traveling back and forth over the surface of the model's body.  

Another term for the ant's path is cross contours.  By looking at the contours criss-crossing Emily's body, noticing where they piled up on top of each other, we could sense the foreshortening.

Adding an outer contour line and a shadow or two added enough depth and dimension to bring the figure to life.

We made a longer study of foreshortening with a 15-minute pose, and added a fabric drape to give us some practice drawing fabric, too.

We finished the class with a long pose of about an hour, with breaks for Emily.  Her pose incorporated foreshortening, fabric and a clear view of her face for those who were drawn to portraiture.

Many thanks to Emily for her beautiful poses and inspiration!

Osher Figure Drawing with Model Kathryn

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!

Osher Figure Drawing with Model Kathryn

Today was the start of a new semester of Figure Drawing classes for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at CMU.  So good to be back at the easel drawing Kathryn and talking with my students!  

We started with 3-minute gestures, moved on to 1-minute abstract 5-line drawings and finished with a 15-minute pose and a 35-minute pose. Kathryn brought us lovely, elegant poses, each one suited for the project at hand.

Kathryn has mastered the art of holding a pose that translates well on the page as a 5-Line drawing.

Kathryn limited the foreshortening in her poses for our gesture warm-ups:

More Colorist's Value Studies of the Figure

In Friday's Osher class, David was our model, and it felt so good to have a model in the studio, even though I was drawing off the monitor like my students. David gave us creative gesture poses, and a lovely long pose, and he set up the lights to provide us with lots of gorgeous shadows.

We did studies of legs and feet, but with a playful twist.  I demonstrated my approach of looking for highlights, midtones, moderate shadows & deep shadows, and assigning a different color to each tone.  Instead of trying to represent familiar body parts, this approach invites you to capture shadow shapes, which I find freeing.  I had an especially good time discovering the little negative space shadows between the toes in this drawing.

During the gesture poses, I focused on capturing the masses of David's body in the first minute, then took the final 2 minutes to seek out contour lines and shadows.