So Much!

Warning! This post contains images of nude figure drawings. If this is NSFW for you, you've been warned!

Ah, the semester is in full swing, and it's amazing how intense and time-consuming schoolwork can be. Both classes are going well though. I'm learning tons in Color & Design and getting a lot of good practice in Intermediate Figure Drawing. Both classes are stretching me quite a bit, which is a good thing. Color & Design is like constant flashes of insight and wonder. I've taken some color theory in the past, but nothing like this. There is not enough time to experiment and practice the way I want to.

Look, I made a color wheel!


The trick is, that whole wheel was mixed from just six different tubes of paint (the swatches with dots over them). Now we all know that yellow and blue make green, but it's very different to gradually mix blue into yellow and "discover" greens, one at a time. It's almost like learning words, seeing how letters fit together to create a pattern that means something. Except it's colors fitting together to create a recognizable hue. And then you add to that black and white and mixing complements, etc. and it's all really very exciting.

Plus you get to do nice things like this monochromatic portrait. I used the same reference a while back in this blog for some painting, but I sure like it better like this, in lovely blue-violets and lilac:


So next up we'll be combining hues and values and so forth to do a portrait design, and I'm very excited about it. I've never had such a handle on color before - it's totally not the same as just matching what you see. There's so much more. It's hard to put into words.

And now to flood you all with tons of naked people!


The week before last we started doing full-value drawings like the one above, and I felt very confident about it. We also did this value portrait, which was great for forcing oneself to get a lot of charcoal on the page (and also great fun for using the kneaded erasure to lift it out again):


I think it was the week before that we copied a photo of this statue, too, which was also very good practice at shading and values, though the torso nearly drove me crazy:



So getting high marks on those, I was feeling pretty confident in my drawing skills and my charcoal technique. I also took photos as I went along for one of the exercises, so I have this nice step-by-step to share with you!

Step 1:

This is the hardest part, doing the actual drawing, putting a figure on a blank page. You can see a lot of my measurements and plumb lines here, and some corrections. I work in vine for this stage so I can brush it off easily, and try to use as many straight lines as possible.

Step 2:

Here I've outlined the drawing in charcoal pencil, and put in the basic shadow-shapes.

Step 3:

I then use a tissue to smear the charcoal all over the paper. Once everything is a gray mess, I pick out the highlights again with a kneaded erasure.

Step 4:

Here we go back in with the charcoal and work on the shadows. This step takes a very, very long time, as I go over everything, adding darks and smoothing them into midtones, then picking out the highlights again.

And here is the finished drawing:


Now that I have a handle on that technique, which seems to work every time (at least that's what the grades show!) I've started to experiment more with gesture and texture and more expressiveness. I hope it won't end up a detriment, as I haven't gotten grades back yet this week! But here are two more, with, I hope, a little added "oomph":


That second one, I'm really proud of. It seems to me to be more than just a figure drawing exercise, that it captures some moment or some emotion. Not bad for a drawing off a photo of a model!

So there's the past few weeks, and hopefully I won't let so much time pass before the next post here! There's some pretty exciting fun stuff ahead, so I'll try to keep track of it and post when I can!