Life Drawing Workshop -

After the past three years of nearly non-stop illustrating, I've decided that I'd really like to focus some time on drawing from life - especially the human figure. To that end, as I've mentioned before I've volunteered to monitor figure drawing several times a month at a local art studio. And when I finished this latest illustration job I signed up for a three day Figure Drawing Workshop with fabulous local artist Ned Mueller. Ned says he's been making art for over 60 years, 25 of which were as an illustrator, so I was especially interested in learning more about his approach. His life drawings are beautiful.

Ironically, the model didn't show up today (one of my ongoing nightmares of monitoring), so instead we got an overview of portraiture (and used classmates as models. Here is Ned demonstrating. Perfect, gorgeous and fast).

It was a good review both of principles and of Ned's particular techniques - he uses bistre conte on smooth newsprint, with a kneaded eraser for highlights.

Might I say that smooth newsprint is *awesome*! I've always struggled with conte, but I've always used rough newsprint, so it was very unfriendly and nearly impossible to pull out highlights from. Not so with the smooth! It is lovely and fast. (I got some teacher input on this one so that I could better follow his eye for nuance).

And this regal class member posed for our last view of the day -

I did this one entirely on my own. I would have liked about another 5 minutes to resolve a few more things more accurately, but it was great fun overall. Hopefully the model will show up tomorrow and we'll get to work on the entire figure.

It'll be a full weekend. And I've still to dig out my studio, not to mention tackle the remainder of the house. So I thoroughly apologize to all you bloggers whose blogs I am not keeping up with right now. I do hope to return to the realm of mutual blogland fairly soon.