Chiaroscuro with Model Shannon

 

With the number of Covid-19 cases in our area decreasing, we have been able to invite a different model out to my studio for Osher class each week.  Last Friday, we were fortunate to have model Shannon, who held strong, active gestural poses for us to warm up with.

I invited my students to sketch with their non-dominant hand on some of their gesture drawings to loosen up their work and break out of old habits. Even though it felt strange, I was pleased with the results in my drawings.

After gestures, we moved on to a 15-minute, cropped pose that focused on Shannon's muscular back & torso.

We finished up class with an hour-long pose, broken into 25-minute segments.  

We used bold, chiaroscuro lighting and took the subtractive approach to drawing her, starting with  vine charcoal rubbed over the drawing paper to lay in a mid-tone, and then lifting out areas of highlight with a kneaded eraser.  I sketched in a gesture with vine charcoal, then used compressed charcoal to finish my drawing and make it permanent.

Many thanks to model Shannon!

Electric Spaghetti Figure Drawing with Model David

My Osher Figure Drawing class has covered some interesting ground this semester -- from charcoal and pastel drawings to upside-down drawings, to creating "Electric Spaghetti" collaborative gestures through the Annotation function on Zoom.  

My students experienced a burst of creativity and excitement with last week's "Collaborative Neon Gestures," so I repeated the activity.  David took the pose, I gave the start cue, and magically, colorful lines started piling up within & on David's form. We paused, and David took another pose, complementary to the first, and the electric spaghetti lines completed the composition.

This week, some of my students expanded into drawing features and shadows.  In this time of isolation, connecting with each other in a collective drawing felt like victory.  And a refreshing way to play.

We changed gears back to using paper and charcoal for gesture warm ups before taking on the challenge of drawing David in a long pose.

And the final project was a long drawing using the subtractive method.  The pose provided a solid challenge  -- heavy foreshortening, drawing the face, hands and feet, and capturing dimensions with shadows and highlights --and a way to practice what we'd been studying the last 5 weeks.  

Stepping back from my drawing, I felt I should add in a lute and a lion to this composition, to create a male version of Henri Rousseau's "The Sleeping Gypsy."  

It was lovely to be swept away for an hour to just focus on drawing David and discovering where that drawing process led me. 

Collaborative Neon Gestures with Model Kathryn

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 recommend you give it a try!