I’m participating in Figuary 2020 through the Croquis Cafe (on Vimeo). Last night LoveLifeDrawing’s instructional suggestion was to exaggerate. That inspired this – 16×20, oil:
Category: art
experiment
So, this was the challenge I set up for myself. Start with a warm-up. Warm up is using graphite on 24×36” paper. Warm up is drawing with my whole arms (a graphite stick in each hand) making as many different kinds of marks as I can, but without a plan. Just moving.
Part two: using an eraser only, pull out a self-portrait. No adding any more lines. And do it ten times.
Part three: after 10 times I allowed myself to add in more lines. Still thinking about it. hmmmmm.
next ones
stay tuned
I am going to do at least nine more of these! Excited by a new idea.
Figuary
Maybe you’ve heard of Inktober? It’s a daily challenge to draw with ink every day in October. Now we have Figuary, a friendly challenge to draw from a human model each day. One organization (Love Life Drawing) has daily drawing instruction and one has video of models in timed poses (Croquis Cafe).
Here is my 5 min sketch for today:
And here is my No. 1 art assistant:
figures with backgrounds
In the past, I’ve done portraits and figures and tried to invent the background. Not always successfully, not always effectively. And not really understanding what the problem is/was.
Now I’m working on figures WITH backgrounds (from photos) that make some good compositional sense.
resolved
You know that procrastination you do about that thing that scares you? I joined a Meet Up group online that lists local live model figure drawing classes weekly. Week after week I received the notices. After week. After week. Then I made it a New Year’s resolution to go. Today I did. It was easy, perfect, relaxed, serious. Yay!
blue tape philosophy
A post on Facebook declared that Picasso created about 50,000 art works, of which 100 today are known/valued. The point of the post was that art is a numbers game – and not every thing you make is going to be quality, revolutionary, evanescent.
But you/I will have made it.
I regularly put stuff up that I’ve made – but not framed – I put it up with blue painter’s tape. I’m looking at it, I’m thinking about it, but I see it all as practice and learning. It’s rarely a finished product.
That being said, I can also still get moody – up-moody or down-moody about the process, my stuff. Helps to notice that, and remember that the critical mind cannot make a damn thing.
chairs, oil, 9×12 inches
painting cards
Painting a variety of Christmas cards this year.
Figure class
Spent from 10-5 pm today in a class called “Expressive Figure Drawing” at the Miller School of Art. We had a wonderful model and lots of interesting challenges.
Here we were looking for the mass/gravity center of the model:
Here we were drawing then painting her face on top of a random collection of negative spaces
