Osher Figure Drawing Class with Model Shannon

I had alerted my students that I planned to do some creative activities with color in Friday's class, and asked them to bring their pastels, chalks or other colorful media to the session.  

During the 3-minute gestures, I invited my students to begin drawing with a lighter color to make their first messy marks.  After a minute, we changed colors to a contrasting/darker hue, and captured our final contours and shadows. Our model Shannon held some uplifting 3-minute poses.

As we progressed, I added more colors to my palette, finishing with white for the highlights, fuchsia for the midtones, and blue for contours and shadows.  

I love using bright, contrasting colors to create drama in a drawing.

After we finished our gestures, we talked about methods for drawing the hands, and practiced with a 15-minute hand study.

We finished up with a long pose.  I took the colorists approach to my pastel drawing of Shannon, following the rule that you can use any color you like in a composition, as long as it is of the same value (light to dark) as the original color in the scene.  It felt freeing and energizing to create with bold colors, and I played with swoops and swirls in the negative space.

Many thanks to model Shannon for her strong poses and creative inspiration!

Osher Figure Drawing with Model Alexx

Model Alexx inspired me and my students on Friday morning with a series of gorgeous gesture poses.  

We began with six, one-minute poses.  I invited my students to group three drawings to a page.  I love how Alexx created varied poses that worked together as a set, and her inventiveness in incorporating a fan.

We moved onto to two minute poses, followed by a five-minute pose (photo at top).

It felt so freeing to draw pose after pose, falling into a flow state, and knowing that with a Sharpie, I couldn't go back and erase. It pushed me to be bold and respond directly to the curves and contours I saw.

For our final long pose (below), I began with a gesture done in vine charcoal, then wiped off the charcoal with a rag, leaving a ghost image of what I had drawn as a guide.  I finished the hour-long pose (broken into 25-minute segments with stretch breaks for Alexx) with my Sharpie.

One of my students, Cathleen, commented that each different medium we use creates different marks, moods, and image styles.  I agree, and I notice that each different medium expresses a different facet of us as artists.

So why not pick up a different medium than what you've been using, and make some sketches? Play around, and see what wants to be expressed within you.

Pittsburgh Figure Drawing Meetup Open Studio with Emily

 
We had a wonderful open studio session on Sunday afternoon with model Emily.  She held lovely poses and was a delight to draw.  I had fun with colored pencils!

You can see more drawing from the event here: https://www.meetup.com/Pittsburgh-Figure-Drawing/photos/31320874/495301533/

Figure Drawing with Model Red

 

We had a great Osher class session with new model Red.  Our project this week was to study foreshortening, so we began with wrapped line gesture drawings, imagining that our charcoal was charting the path of an ant traveling over the contours of Red's form.

I find that this approach frees us up to really study the model, and explore the landscape of the human form.

We began adding a touch of shading on the wrapped line gestures to give some dimension. 

This practice set us up for a study of foreshortening, sketching Red's arm as he moved it incrementally inwards towards the camera.

We finished up with a long seated pose for the final hour of the session.  Inspiring!

Osher Figure Drawing with Kathryn

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.  

What an uplifting way to spend a Friday morning!

 

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.