Figure Drawing, pt.1

The last time I attended any figure drawing was probably in 2000-01. The Pacific Art League offered and, as of this writing, still offers a variety of Life Drawing classes. This included uninstructed classes during the day. For most people, this is problematic because they work or already attend classes during the day. For a freelancer, if you have the time you can shift your hours around and so I did. I’d sign up for the entire course and yet probably only attend about half the sessions due to other commitments. I did this for about a year during that stint.

20 min. Conte pencil and stick, ~7x12”

So, I was a bit nervous about beginning life drawing again. I guess I felt a bit rusty. I didn’t have all the materials needed in my Guerrilla-art studio, so I headed out and grabbed my basic kit:

• Black Conte sticks, 2B

• Black Conte pencils (don’t remember hardness, but they don’t exactly jive with the sticks so I tend to use them apart from each other)

• Canson “Universal Sketch” pad, 11x14 with perforated sheets (a must). Acid-free, 65lbs 100 sheets. I actually hadn’t used this pad before but it didn’t break the bank and was a nice weight and feel.

20 min. Conte pencil and stick, ~7.5x9”

Other tools would appear in time but with that in place, I headed down to the twice-weekly pay-as-you-go sessions, in the evening this time. I much prefer evening sessions since you can get your day’s work in first and then head over with available energy. Once again, due to my schedule I’m happy to make one session per week though I’d love to do both.

I was a little nervous as I settled in among the other artists there, many studying at the atelier where the classes are held, one that focuses on classical techniques. The model took the platform and as the 5-minute warm-ups began all anxiety fled and the intense focus of drawing took over. Extremely time-limited work usually does that to you. Almost immediately I found my groove and enjoyed my time immensely. Poses were 5x5min., and 4x20 min.

20 min. Conte pencil, ~4.5x10” Starting here I ceased using the pencil and stick together due to the difference in sheen they had.

As time goes on and this series continues I’ll try to expand a bit on method and materials.

Lemonade From Lemons

I had three blog posts written this week, all on the aforementioned figure drawing topic, that I was going to post today and in coming weeks. Somehow, the first two disappeared (files overwritten). Stupid mistake but it cost me a decent chunk of time and I'm too tired to recreate them. Instead, a post of randomness.

While living abroad the last couple of years I didn't watch much TV. Now that iTunes is offering TV shows, however, we've been pretty hooked catching up on Prison Break. No, I'm not watching 24 at the moment. I really much prefer watching programs either through iTunes or on DVD. 15 minutes of commercials * 22-24 episodes = a lot of time.

Over the holidays my wife caught some buzz on Heroes. Then NBC did a very cool thing: they made all the episodes up to that time available online, in their entirety, with only very short commercial breaks. As of this writing they have continued doing so (18 episodes now). My wife spent an illness catching up and I saw about half the episodes and now we're hooked there too.

My guerrilla art studio is setup about 3 feet away from the tv off to my right. If that sounds small it's because where I am living at the moment is just shy of 500'sq. Thankfully this allows me to watch tv and paint at the same time. Otherwise, I'd never indulge in American Idol as I have this season. I don't even like that sort of music, and promise that I do not own an album by anyone who has appeared on the show. Really.

I did recently pick up both albums by Keane. Before we moved to Italy I caught them on SNL and really dug their first single. I lost track of them while abroad. Now I'm back and catching up. Radio-friendly but good.

What else? My friend Ben Thompson has worked for years on the MMO Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, which released not too long ago, finally. If you dig Ben's work, much of the visual design was shaped by him and the late Keith Parkinson. So yeah, if you like Ben and Keith's work, this game is for you. Me, I'm still playing WoW (sorry Ben!).

Alright I'll retype those blog entries for next week. Have fun with the links.

When's the book? pt.3

Last summer it occurred to me that in this whole make-a-book thing, it might be best to get some experience and start a bit less ambitious than a full-color book that might get buried without distribution and just not be something I’d be proud of. The paintings that will eventually be in it will probably never be printed in another book like it again in my lifetime, so it seemed worth it to get it right. However, the book idea is still going full-bore. What I’m working on for release early summer (fingers crossed) is a book of drawings and sketches. It will require a lot of the things a color book would need, and would be more ideally suited to a smaller print-run.

Starting about the end of 2003, I began focusing on tighter preliminary drawings, and almost every painting now has a fairly tight drawing accompanying it, if not more than one. These vary from tight indications of central figures with no background to very rendered full-image drawings. I’ve taken these around to conventions and have sold them well the past few years. Going earlier than that there are a few sketches here and there that might qualify, but in many cases the drawings were done on the board itself and painted over. Only in a few cases did I have the presence of mind to scan the drawing before covering it in paint. If you’ve seen some of these prior posts you’ll get an idea for what these drawings I’m talking about look like. I think all the ones in those posts are in the “in” pile, many will be reproduced at or near original size.

So the plan is to have this ready for summer conventions which typically start for me in July for San Diego Comic-Con. I’d like to have it available on my website maybe a month or so earlier still if possible.

So a lot of work has been done on this front now—a raft of scanned drawings have been pulled out and are being cleaned up digitally so the whites are nice and white and the details crisp (I’m not altering the drawings digitally). They’re being proofed and the final selection chosen. I’m checking with clients to see what drawings will be moved to a potential future volume: for instance, my work in Magic’s Core 10^th Edition set won’t release til the week before Comic-Con or thereabouts. So, if I want the book to release any earlier than that, I have to not have those drawings in the book (they’ve been moved to a folder called “Potential vol.2”). There are a couple other projects this might be an issue for as well.

After finalizing the list of drawings I’m now doing some final cleanup, then will begin laying it out. All sorts of considerations are involved: bar coding, ISBN, deciding or producing a cover image, having a small initial run made then soliciting distribution. Should I produce a limited-edition hardcover version? It’s going to be a thinner book, 64 pages, somewhere around 100 drawings. What should I call it?

In the meantime, I continue painting anyway and improving the content of the postponed color book.

Naked People

Spend any time in art classes and you will eventually have to draw the nude model. Typically, this most basic and enduring practice is begun at the college level—an unfortunate thing.

Back in the old days (100 years ago, and probably a bit more recent than even that), it was the case that before you could even sit before a live model, you would be forced to make drawn copies of plaster casts of classical statuary. This would continue for some time, would assume a certain ability to draw already, and would be so that your instructor could “fact-check” your drawing against the never-moving statue, as well as allowing you to draw from the most idealized figures (beauty was a quantifiable thing in those days). The studies would be detailed, and with plaster you would not be distracted by color, so that you could focus on value (light and dark) in black-and-white almost exclusively. Value is the anchor of color, and accuracy in drawing is the skeleton of painting, so this practice definitely had worth. I can’t say I would’ve been happy spending months and months laboring on statuary, I’m sure I would’ve been impatient, but it would’ve served me well.

Back at CCA, where I studied, I was told that in decades past they had this type of curriculum, that there was a room full of plaster casts that were either dumped by the wayside or lost; they just disappeared though a few remained. I think I recall exactly two occasions where I worked from plaster. In the interest of focusing on dynamism, and probably due to the lack of patience in young students, this step was skipped and artists-in-training were put in front of live models from the first year on. It’s not that it’s a mistake to do so, but if you hit the model unprepared, you will struggle for a long time before making any significant progress.

Hours and hours of study on single drawings of plaster casts were replaced with the fast-food of drawing: gesture drawings. 1-2 minute scribbles where motion is the thing, the basic arcs, but little importance is placed on anatomical accuracy. There is something to be gained from gesture drawings, but it has become a de facto standard for the first 20 minutes or so of any life drawing session. Frankly, I think the greatest value gesture drawings have is simply in warming-up, but that could be done beforehand and it’s probably true that if you hone your eyes, you don’t even need it.

In any case, study of the figure is something I’ve tried to retain over the years as I’ve been able. Sometimes it is hard to find figure drawing sessions depending on where you live, or sometimes the only ones you can find are instructed beginner-level community college courses or their equivalent. For any artist who is somewhere beyond intro-level, finding either advanced coursework or open (uninstructed) sessions can be difficult or expensive in the former case, but can also be gold when found.

Back in California, I attended multiple semesters worth of uninstructed life drawing (post-college) at the Pacific Art League in Palo Alto. My illustration schedule meant I never made all the sessions, but having paid for them it motivated me to attend most. As of this writing, they still offer uninstructed drawing as well as a wealth of instructed figurative and other courses—if you live in the SF Bay Area, it is worth checking out and is relatively affordable (you seen the prices for art school these days?).

Recently I found another place with uninstructed figure drawing out in North Carolina and have begun going down about once a week. It’s been a few years and is refreshing. All of this is to say that while I’m attending, you’re going to probably start to see blog entries with drawings of nude figures (always done tastefully, no peepshow here) from time to time. Perhaps they’ll be accompanied at times with talk about drawing from the figure.