life drawing/painting sessions: week #4

20-minute pose

this week's session was 3 hours long which i found at about the 2 hour and 15 minutes was too long for me. the sad part was that the more challenging poses that night were at the end so i wasn't nearly as sharp (relative term!) as earlier and didn't really do the figure the justice that it deserved.  be that as it may, here are the offerings this week. i do most of them the same way. i start with a line drawing that is more or less contour but with some gesture lines thrown in to get the general direction and angles of the limbs, etc. this usually takes me about 10-20 minutes depending on the pose and leaves me roughly half of the time allotted for the painting part. i learned my lesson last week not to try to do an initial wash over the whole figure as it doesn't have time to dry, so i have abandoned that strategy. i then do the face...which may have too much detail than is necessary, but i like the practice doing them. after finishing the face i put in the major shadows on the figure and try to do some cast shadows at the same time to get some tie-ins. this is usually with some sort of blue to get the warm-cool interplay. i am starting to understand some of the basic proportions and how they relate to each other so that i can anticipate the way a line should go and then with some quick observation corroborate positon and length, say, of a limb. i will share these once i am a little more sure of them.

30-minute pose

40-minute pose

there is an extra session tomorrow that will be one pose for roughly 2-3 hours. my understanding is that it is usually a draped session but we will see.

45-minute pose