Osher Figure Drawing Class with Kathryn & David

In our final class of the Osher autumn term, we were fortunate to have two skilled models working together.  Kathryn & David created beautiful 5-minute gesture poses to get us warmed up.  

I had told my students to follow their intuition in selecting a medium to use in this class, and I chose charcoal for the gestures and pastel for the long pose.

Kathryn & David used the gesture poses for expressive storytelling, and I invited my students to focus on the negative space between & around David & Kathryn to help simplify the complex shapes.  

I really enjoyed this approach; instead of seeing their two figures as independent structures, I could look at them as a whole composition and capture the flow and energy of the pose.

For the long pose, I used colored pastel paper (Canson Mi Teintes), and took a colorists approach, selecting a different color for each value in the composition.   After the isolation of the pandemic, I am drawn to using vibrant colors to express the vitality of the models I draw and my joy in being together in person.

Many thanks to Kathryn & David for their inspiration in this class, and their work throughout the pandemic to make our Osher classes an oasis in a time of isolation and difficulty.  Your creativity and hard work uplifted many artists.

Bravo!

Portrait of a Young Nerd

Sometimes I'm the instructor of a Zoom drawing class, sometimes I'm the model, and occasionally, I'm the camera and computer operator. When David models and the class consists of shorter poses, I'm kept busy  running the equipment.  But on a recent evening class via Zoom, David sat for a portraiture class, and I sketched while keeping an eye on the timer, the camera and the computer.  

Each portrait I draw of David has its own personality.  I call this the portrait of David as a Young Nerd.  As a big fan of nerds, I'm happy with that aspect of the drawing, and can remember him as a young man well-versed in physics, computers and technology.   

I used a graphite pencil, and it felt good to be able to work with a fine-pointed instrument after many Zoom classes using charcoal.

Osher Figure Drawing Class: Zoom Summer School with Model Kathryn

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.

Osher Figure Drawing with Model Emily

We had a wonderful Osher class today with model Emily!  We began the class with five two-minute gesture poses, and I encouraged my students to draw rapidly, capturing interior structures as well as exterior contours. Emily gave us active, elegant poses to study.

We moved on to drawing the face using shadows primarily.  David set the camera to transmit a black-and-white image, and we started the first two minutes of the fifteen-minute pose with the camera de-focused. After two minutes, we sharpened the image a little, and after two more minutes, we sharpened the image to tack-sharp.  

This approach allowed us to really see the shadow shapes without getting caught up in trying to draw features, and it forced a technique artists often use in the studio in real life, intentionally blurring their vision.  

 We finished up with an hour-long pose (with breaks for Emily!).  Some students focused just on the portrait, and others drew the entire foreshortened pose.

Many thanks to model Emily for her elegant poses and rock-solid stillness!

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!