Warning! This post contains possibly NSFW nude figure drawings! Proceed at your own risk!
Spring semester at the Academy of Art University ended on the 22nd. I handed in my last figure drawing and my sculpted clay portrait head, made sure everything was tied up neatly for my Art History classes, Facebook'ed a few new friends and closed the sessions up for good. One of the little cons about online classes is that once they're gone they're gone - no textbooks or handouts you can keep, unless you copied and downloaded quite a bit as you went. It's just all *poof* gone, along with all the names and faces and comments and discussions along the way.
The longer I'm at AAU the more I regret that, especially in regards to the module content. I did save a lot of the models from the figure drawing class, as they'll be excellent to practice from again and again.
The gist of it, of course, is always, "What did you learn?" Hence the reason why I'm taking classes anyway. The biggest thing I learned in Figure Drawing was this: Get it right. Get it right at the beginning, at the start, and don't move on until you know it's right.
That guy above took a long time to get right. And a lot of checking and correcting and fixing again, all in horribly scribbly vine charcoal before I ever went near the page with anything permanent. It's amazing though, how much you can depend on that scribbly mess of lines when you know they're right. Then you can just relax and just go over it and find the values and details and style the lines, etc.
The hardest part of a drawing is the first half hour.
In Figure Sculpting, it was all about what lies underneath.
I've drawn lots of skulls. I've drawn "planar heads". But I didn't *get* it until I sculpted them. I didn't get things like the ridge around the outside of the eye socket or how the cheekbone flows back to the ear. These are things you can *see* when you look at a face, but understanding what's underneath makes it so much easier to draw.
We did a lot of full-figure work, too, but I was just too clumsy with the clay to get as much out of it as far as learning underlying structure goes. I did get a much better sense of the hip mass and the chest mass and how they are connected, as well as some nifty things about shoulders (the egg-shape of the chest mass with shoulders then attached, instead of an upside-down triangle of chest mass with arms stuck on the top).
That kind of understanding helped a lot when drawing poses like this:
And this:
It's funny how you come to see the chest/ribcage area as kind of... not well-attached to the hips. But it allows for all kinds of tilting and rolling around and such, letting the abdomen be all springy and twisty in the middle. It's something I want to do a lot more practice with.
And then, of course, we have the back:
Which is still very complicated to me! Shoulder blades have lost some of their mystery though. Overall, both classes helped demystify the human figure for me quite a bit. I feel a lot more confident now, and know that if I'm careful and check over things and keep a lot of what I've learned in mind as I draw (and practice practice practice!) I'll be able to keep things together, and better yet, put together figures from various references and such for original poses.
Lastly, I had some huge revelations while taking my Art History through the 19th Century class. I've always been one of those academic naturalism snobs. There, I admit it. I was the person who thought Bouguereau was all that ever needed to be, utter perfection, and everyone should aspire to paint like that. Maybe it was seeing the whole progress of art from the Renaissance to Impressionism, or maybe it was learning how varied things really were, but I really found my mind opened to different styles and techniques. I can't say I love *all* Impressionism now, but I do love a lot of the Realism painters and some that came after, and I have a greater appreciation for texture and color and painting light through color instead of value. I also have a greater appreciation for preserving line, right in contradiction with my new appreciation for more painterly brushstrokes. So I'm very curious what I'll do when I start painting again.
All I know is that I *might* allow myself not to labor over every brushmark and making sure every outline is totally rendered over!
Anyway, I wrote my final term paper on martyrdom and Goya and Ribera, and if anyone would like to read it, I have it online here. Don't steal it!!
Yesterday I bought a half dozen little 5"x7" canvasboards and two 8"x8" little gallery wrapped squares. I have a week off still before my intersession class starts (20th Century Art History) and still a dozen things on my to-do-before-then list, but I am absolutely certain I will get to painting SOON!
