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.

Figure Drawing Update: Hector

 

A dancer by training, Hector created beautiful poses for our Osher figure drawing class on Sept. 25th

Figure Drawing Class

Here are a few drawings from my Osher Figure Drawing class today.  I have included the homework projects I assigned the class last week. I had fun creating a value study with different media.  That practice set me up to really appreciate the various values in the vase and hand drawings.

Model David gave us some beautiful poses today as we studied hands and feet. My charcoal sketches are below.

Homework: 

Class today:

David's foot in detailed study.  I had to use the "paper stretcher" because I ran out of space on the page!