Alright, here they are, my top nine. As I mentioned in my last post, it's nine and not ten because I accidentally included one of my top ten in the last post and then liked what I wrote about it. Including that one (incidentally, it's the one where I talked about my professor's infamous "Wow, that's actually kinda starting to look like a drawing!" complisult--tangentially, whatever spell checker Blogger uses recognizes the word "complisult," which is cool), these ten were my final for the class. They probably look deceptively better than my others due to the new camera I bought in between shoots, but they are also much, much higher quality. Speaking of camera quality though, the one I've chosen as the header image for this post was never one of my favorites on paper, but for some reason I love the photographed image of it--so much so that I decided to also use it on my About page. Partially because it seems to go well with my whole theme; his pose is kind of Thinker-esque, right? It helps that this is one of my only high-quality figure drawings of a person matching my own gender identity. Not that that's really all that consequential. Moving on...
I'll start with my least favorite. This one is pretty inconsequential--nothing too special about it. In fact if I had to choose again I'm not sure I would include this one in my top ten. In fact now that I'm think about it I'm not sure I actually did. Whoops.
I just realized that over half of these are based on draped (clothed) models. That's interesting to me, for a beginning figure drawing class. (As I mentioned before, at least at my school draped models are reserved for the advanced course, although technically all the models are "draped.") Anyway, I put this one next because it really exemplifies what I was talking about with the foot in the previous one. You can see it not only in the feet of this model but all over. One of my professor's favorite things to emphasize was learning to move from basing your whole drawing on contours (outlines) toward creating the illusion of depth and form by modeling the major shapes of the body with shading. Then at the end, outlines can be added for emphasis. This drawing contains lots of sharp, dark outlines, but none of those were there until the very last stages of drawing. I started the drawing by modeling the large areas of dark and light values and then worked my way up to the more intricate details. That's why this one is especially cohesive and well-proportioned. It's hard to put into words why that's the case, but trust me, it helped.
Sometimes we just had portrait days. Or we were just encouraged to to a portrait if we didn't like the pose. I think this one turned out really nicely. I like doing portraits (and figures for that matter) on a gray-ish background with chalk and charcoal because it has a much more natural dynamic. Everything starts out at a middle tone, and you push back the darks and pull out the lights as needed. Whereas if you start with a shiny white piece of paper and work with a pencil, you have to scribble all over the whole page just to get the value of the face right. Start with some crappy newsprint (which, incidentally, is about 400000% cheaper, too) and everything you do automatically looks a lot artsier.
This one would have fit into the category of more unique or experimental drawings in my last post. The challenge here was to draw using the negative space. For non-artists, negative space basically means everything but what you're trying to draw. So, if you're drawing a person standing in front of a blue wall, you would draw the blue wall and leave the space where the person is standing blank. It's one of my favorite techniques, and it's especially useful for beginners. Often beginning artists will stop looking at the object they are trying to draw and start using symbolic images from their head--for example, instead of drawing an actual eye, a beginner might resort to a football shape. That's not what eyes look like at all, but it is a symbol for an eye. If the person draws the negative space around the eye instead, they are more likely to be able to detach themselves from that symbolic image and draw what they are actually seeing. For this image, the pink and purple areas are the negative space from earlier poses. I overlaid the black to model the form of this model. Once I had the basic negative shape down, I went inside the form and added a little bit of shading to model the arm, hip, and thigh.
I don't have too much to say about this one... It's good I guess? I really do like it a lot... I like how I handled the lighting. I really like the foot as well--if you can't tell, I'm pretty proud of myself when I draw feet well; they are one of the more difficult subjects to draw. Only the hands and head compare, at least as far as single body parts (bodies as a cohesive whole are probably up there as well). In fact, I've heard of pervy teenage boys drawing naked girls and leaving the socks on just so that they don't have to draw feet. It's... sad, for a few reasons.
* * *
I do feel like I should say a few more words about my figure drawing teacher. That man is pretty much my hero. He dresses like Willy Wonka, his eyebrows are like four inches long... He's the ultimate crazy old man, except that he is also this amazing illustrator and showed us all these photos from his New York studio apartment where he lived for years when he was trying to get established. It's the life I dream of living--the life of ridiculous attire and being in New York, pretty much. With art in there somewhere. He was also very encouraging, though his blunt complisults certainly kept everyone's egos in check. He was probably not as rigorous as most figure drawing teachers, at least in the illustration department, but I learned a lot from him. Really, I don't have that much to say in detail but I did notice that I kind of ripped into my painting teacher and I feel kind of bad about it because I'm sure he's great for students who match his style... So I just wanted to throw it out there that I do not hate all art teachers.
*I've decided to stop being so vague about my professors and start including links to their work. I couldn't find an official webpage for Mark, but here is a page listing several of the book he's illustrated.