Figure Drawing, pt.11

A: 4.5x5.5" pencil
L: 8.25x3.5" conte pencil

Hmm, I intended on doing figure drawing twice a month. Turns out at this rate that once every other month is more like it! As we've settled in out in NYC, I've kinda been pacing myself with activities. There are tons of things to do, some which I've mentioned, some which I haven't--openings and other art-related happenings. I think given the other things I do, I've informally decided that I can do one extra-curricular art-related thing per week. Doing so always takes up half the day, which when you add in other stuff means that blocks of work can get eaten up quickly. There was a convention recently, and since my last session, the holidays. So, yeah, twice a month is going to be tricky. This is a busy city. Maybe I'll have to chronicle some of these other things I do, if I can do them without sounding like a gossip-magazine, going on about all the cool illustrators and folks I get to rub shoulders with.

In any case, drawing last night. Located on the second floor of the Society of Illustrators, which is the bar as I've mentioned, the walls are decked out with some killer illustration from the Society's permanent collection. They recently swapped out the display and added in some phenomenal works by the likes of Cornwell and N.C. Wyeth. I kicked myself for not thinking to ever bring my camera to photograph this stuff, since when it gets rotated out who knows when I'll see it again. So, that'll have to happen, and serves as motivation to get me back to drawing again very soon.

Settling in, I actually wasn't feeling too ready-to-go. However, I was mostly happy with the results. I complain about it all the time, but the 20 minute limit kills me. For the last pose of the night, the ol' folding chair was brought out. I mean, you can't do seated poses without a seat, and folding chairs allow people to see the model from more angles. But they're ugly, and they just make another element you have to include in a limited period of time. I don't often do full-figure drawings anymore, often because of the time limits. On this one, as I started in, I realized I wasn't going to have time to do any rendering because I did want to get the whole figure in. So I just did it as a contour drawing. One thing you can see are interior contour forms--basically I often draw this way, drawing interior shapes, the shapes of major shadow areas. With more time, I then shade these areas and break them into smaller forms. You can see it in other drawings in this series. So these last two exemplify two opposite ends of my approaches--contour on the left, and mass-drawing on the right. Usually done during shorter poses, and with fatter media (conte crayon in this case), the goal is to mass in the shadows, and draw more by indicating these masses than focusing on the outer and inner contours. So things like the distinction between the legs gets washed out, as I focus more on value (light/dark) than line--and in this case drawing the line that would distinguish the legs would've been more artifice than anything--the distinction was really quite blurred out, indicated more by the shadow shapes at the knees than anything.

L: 6.25x9" pencil R: 2x8" conte crayon