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Friday, January 16, 2009

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.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here's a life drawing challenge ... start with a young model and then see if you can draw aged versions of this model by accurately predicting how the face and body will change at 30, 40, 50, 60, 70.

Gretel said...

Good stuff!

Anonymous said...

This looks very interesting. I love to draw, but only simple stuff. Nothing like faces.

Anonymous said...

So impressed with how well you do. I do hope your model shows up. Thanks for sharing. I really enjoy seeing these.

Angela Wales Rockett said...

She is regal. And you really captured that, and her fantastic hair!

d. moll, l.ac. said...

Great work, way to pull those highlights.

Elizabeth said...

Gosh theses pictures take me back to my art school days - long ago.
Our models were all rather odd looking though unlike your splendid sitters - especially the woman.
How well you work quickly.

Anonymous said...

Very nice, you did beatiful on the lady! Thank you for the nice comments on my site. Your garden sounds wonderful, and its great to meet another chicken fan.

Soozcat said...

Oh, I like the look of your class members! You do such beautiful work.

natural attrill said...

Fabulous drawings, as usual!
I like the models hair.
Penny.