I mentioned in my last post that I had already learned a fair amount about figure drawing from my high school days checking out and working from library books on the subject. I think it's fairly apparent from my earlier drawings in the class that I already knew more or less what I'm doing; however, it's also very apparent that I still had a long way to go (I still do; I'm hoping that someday, after a few more figure drawing classes, my best drawings now will feel as underdeveloped as these do now):
If you have a keen eye for bodies you might notice that my biggest problem was probably the proportions between the legs and the rest of the body. I actually still have this problem, though not quite as pronounced. Legs are hard to proportion right because they are just long things that stick out from the rest of the body, so it's hard to relate them to anything other than themselves. You can measure the head or the torso in relation to a dozen other landmarks, but legs are harder. So sometimes it's easy to just start drawing them and then never stop and suddenly you have a pair of unruly squid legs jutting out from a petite torso. You may also notice that the last two drawings here are depicting the model in totally impossible poses. That comes more from a lack of understanding of the gesture--the holistic framework of the pose in which all the individual parts fit. Compared to my later stuff, these are all heavy line drawings: thick, dark lines with very little shading. That's my cartoon background speaking.
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Gesture drawings, as I said, are the remedy for a lot of figure drawing problems. They also happen to be very difficult to access through books or other photo sources (such as online databases) because printing a gesture pose takes as much space and time as printing a sustained pose, but you need probably at least 20 times as many gesture poses as sustained poses to learn how to draw. But whoa, hey there, let's back up and define gesture poses for those non-artists reading this. A gesture drawing is basically one done from a pose that lasts less than two minutes. The idea is to capture the "essence" of the pose without spending too much time worrying about fine details. The simplest gesture drawings are just single curves that follow the expressive line of the spine and one or two appendages. The poses can be as short as 20 seconds. Longer gestures, getting close to the 2-minute mark, can look like they took much longer to draw if you really know what you're doing; once you get the hang of gesture drawing you can capture the gesture within the first few seconds and then start filling in details. When it comes down to it, gesture poses are really the most fun just because the model doesn't have to hold the pose much longer than you'd hold a crazy handstand, so you get to work from some really ridiculous contortionist poses.
This first one is an earlier set of gesture drawings--you can tell that I'm making the same mistakes: focusing to much on the outline, filling it in really heavy and dark, ignoring the basic limits of positions the human body can actually hold.
This one makes me think of something really dark, like the Furies of Greek mythology or something. More importantly though, I'm starting to focus more on areas of value (dark vs. light) than on outlines. You can read the poses well even though there aren't necessarily heave outlines delineating the figures. Because that's how things are in real life: we don't see people surrounded by big, heavy lines in real life.
This guy on the bottom right really illustrates that shift in emphasis from lines to blocks of value. Other than that I don't have much to say about this one except that we did in fact have male models occasionally--not very many, which is why my drawings are dominated by women, and why my drawings of women reflect a wider variety of body types.
Since gesture drawings are so quick to do, my teacher would often recommend that we just rub them off and draw over the remains of previous drawings. Most of my figure drawings from the class have been lost that way, which is fine because I kept the better ones. I think that the stacked images look really cool anyway. Charcoal, which is what most of these drawings are done with, is super easy to rub off. Pastels, like the ones I used for this one and the next couple, are a little tougher. They're also miserable to work with and I kind of hate them. So there's that.
Just some more gesture pages... These ones kind of remind me of Fantasia. You know, the one with the nipple-less centaur women? I don't know if it's the color scheme or the lines I used. The one just above here shows an alternate way of doing gesture drawings; you look for the key joints and major bone structures of the body and basically add flesh to a sort of mannequin base. I see this used a lot more among cartoonists, especially animators, and less among studio artists and illustrators.
I have a couple of these where I drew a figure in white chalk over a rubbed-out background of charcoal figures. I like the ghostly quality it gives the upper layers. As a side note, in this one here and the following one you can really see what a few months of these was doing to my artwork. The shapes make more sense, the poses are more expressive, and even when I do use bold outlines they are more restrained and purposeful.
I don't love that my school required the models to be "draped" (kind of an odd word when the "drapery" in question is a tight bikini top)... bodies just don't look quite the same when you put even a little bit of clothing on them. My teacher would often encourage us to try to leave off the underwear lines if we could, since there is a temptation among beginners to use them as a crutch--people will draw two triangles, for example, instead of an actual bust. So in a lot of my drawings you can hardly tell that the models are wearing anything. But when I did draw the clothing, I tried to do it accurately and without any symbolic shorthand. My sister praised me on this one above in particular, because I included the place where the bikini top pinches into the back and shoulder. Many artists leave that out and try to smooth the curves over, which honestly I think is really weird. Like, is that little curve so offensively hideous that you have to pretend that bras don't apply any pressure on the skin just to make your cartoon character more sexually appealing? Neither the idea that such a thing is more appealing nor the idea of distorting reality for that purpose makes much sense to me. Anyway, just a little side rant.
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A typical class period would begin with a series of gesture drawings, sometimes working up from 30 seconds to 3-5 minutes or so. After that we would do some longer poses, either a 5-10 minute pose or anything up to about 40 minutes. I'm not sure we ever went longer than that... maybe an hour. For poses longer than 20 minutes the models have to take periodic breaks so that, you know, their limbs don't lose circulation and die or whatever. Holding any pose for that long can be really hard, so sometimes their limbs will drift positions as they're sitting there. When they take a break, positions of key joints or shadow angles are marked with tape so they can get back into the same position, but it's rarely the exact same. That's where memorized knowledge gained from anatomical studies or gesture drawing comes in handy; if the pose has changed from when you did a basic outline or block-in to when you're touching up the shading, you can sort of extrapolate shapes and lighting intuitively. If that makes any sense. I'm tired, leave me alone. Anyway, here are some images from later in the class, mostly done from some longer poses:
If you pay attention you can tell that I used that more cartoon-ish stick-figure method to construct this one. I corrected my earlier leg problems by marking off the position of the foot in relation to the torso and pelvis early on in the drawing instead of just tacking the legs on at the end. You'll also notice a huge shift in image quality from this one because I took it with my new camera... More on that in another post.
This one is actually kind of terrible. I'm not sure why it's even here. But hey, not all of my drawings were very good. Mostly I just figure I already took the photo so I might as well keep it here even though I don't know why I felt it was photo-worthy... Maybe just to prove that hey! There were male models too! I wasn't in it just to stare at women in bikinis for hours on end! (That probably sounds super heteronormative, but it's actually a serious thing in the art world where if a male artist paints a lot of women, people automatically speculate about what kind of disturbing sexual fetishes he must have been indulging. I'm sure that's not always inaccurate but can't I just like bodies aesthetically?)
I keep trying to figure out what's up with her left knee... Like is that fabric draped over her thigh, or does she have a bionic leg? We may never know.
Sometimes the framing and juxtaposition of multiple sketches is as beautiful as the actual drawing itself.
This one has kind of a weird agitated vibe but you can tell I'm moving into longer poses here.
The proportions in this one make no sense--like what is the left leg attached to, certainly not the hip socket because nope--but I liked the lighting here.
Here's one of the first ones that's started to look like an actual finished product. Sometimes when that started to happen with your work, the professor would come up behind you and say something like, "Wow, that's kind of starting to look like a drawing!" That sounds incredibly sarcastic and maybe even a little mean, but he didn't mean it that way. Obviously these are all drawings. But he meant a finished drawing, and a "painterly" one--one where you could really see into the mind of the artist and not just a reproduction of a particular scene. In drawings like this one you can see my style coming through--where did I choose to use bold outlines? Where did I leave them out? Are the highlights strategically placed to create a specific point of focus? You can have a photorealistic image that copies the values of the scene perfectly and yet has no personality. That kind of drawing, in my teacher's words, wouldn't look like a drawing.
Here's another one where I like the relation between the finished drawing on top and the sketches beneath. But also I just really like the drawing on top. Her feet are too small, and probably her shins are too short as well, but I think that my personal flair really comes through here. Drawings like this don't just feel like good drawings; they feel like my drawings.
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I would have been totally content to just switch between gestures and longer poses all semester, honing my technical skills. My professor was all about exploring different ways to depict the human form, though, and I think that overall it definitely helped explore and find a personal style. I may not want to ever create an actual painting using a random stick off the ground instead of a paintbrush (yes, we actually did do that one day), but there's something about making your art in kind of a wacky way and losing some control over the process that can help generate new ideas you may not have thought of otherwise, even for what to do with "normal" media. (I know, that contradicts what I said in my oil painting post about how much I hated my "systems" painting and why... Nuance is a thing, okay?) Here are some of my less conventional (running the gamut between "not just a piece of charcoal and an eraser" to "stick dipped in India ink") pieces from the class:
This one is nothing too crazy, just drawing with a combination of charcoal and pastel. Or maybe the black stuff is just black pastel? Again... unsolvable mysteries. Anyway I had fun with the arbitrary color... I was actually kind of going for a warm/cool thing: warm, read shadows and cool, green highlights. (I think normally we tend to assume highlights are warm and shadows are cool... That's true outside but not so necessarily with interiors, especially in a room with a Northern window (or Southern for you folks in that other hemisphere)--which this particular room does have, but I'm not sure it was open at all. Probably not. At any rate if you're not outdoors on a sunny day then the warm/cool dichotomy depends on sooooo many things.
This one is with India ink and white tempera. The form is a little weird but I kind of like it. I'm not sure if I gave it that Gothic S-curve on purpose or not but we'll just say it was on purpose so that I sound like a better artist. Also, confession: I did change the hue a bit and up the saturation just because the colored background looked cooler that way. I figure all of these are such terrible photo quality anyway that distortion is fine.
Another ink/tempera with brush.
This one is a more interesting combination: India ink and pastels. I can't remember if this one was done with a stick but I'm going to say probably not...
...This one definitely was done with a stick though. India ink and white tempera again. The other cool thing about this one is that it's from a series we did based on fashion illustrations. I don't know much about the fashion industry so I'm not sure whether there's an important function served by the style fashion illustrators tend to use, but for whatever reason they have a really cool and unique style, one I'd like to study and implement more in the future.
This one is boring old Conté crayon (you non-artists are like "wait slow down WTF is a Conté crayon that doesn't sound boring" well a Conté crayon is like if charcoal and oil pastel had a baby and that baby did tons of crunches to harden up that body) but it's copied from the sketchbooks of Renaissance artists instead of from life. Copying famous artists is another great way to find a personal style and also just to learn the established "language" of figure drawing.
This one is unique because (gasp!) the model is fully clothed. Drapery is super tricky, to the point where students don't seriously tackle it until advance figure drawing classes, usually. So this sketch is pretty amateurish but I also think it's kind of pretty, so there's that.
Some of the most fun sketches in figure drawing classes are just sketches of the models taking breaks, or meta-sketches of the other students doing sketches. This one is both.
This one was done with colored pencils held between my teeth. Lolz just kidding it's just a weird middle stage of the particular photo-editing process I used on these lower-quality photos. Just thought it looked kind of cool.
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Those were the sketches I thought worth photographing. Of course most of the photos were terrible quality, and I did go through and reshoot some with a nicer camera. I thought about doing that with all of them, but that feels like a lot of work, and honestly these are very much beginner student-quality work and probably not worth immortalizing in the first place, let alone perfectly. More likely I will just take more figure drawing classes and continue to share my more notable pieces. I've saved my "top nine" for my next post. Why top nine and not top ten? Because I accidentally included one of my top ten in this post and then ended up liking what I wrote about it. Whoops.