December 2021
My family celebrates Christmas, and it came early for me this year. An opportunity to show at a coffee shop/gallery in White Center! I have a lucky 13 pieces up for the whole of December. Show proceeds go to WestSide Baby whose mission is to supply equipment, diapers and clothing to children in need. Thanks to DubSea Coffee!
The assignment this week in my ZOOM drawing class:
95% white, 5% black
95% black, 5% white
mid-greys only (no white or black)
and using all: black, white, grey
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:
I am going to do at least nine more of these! Excited by a new idea.
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:
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.
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!
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
Here is an early version of this piece (October 2019).
And here is the same canvas today.
learning is where it’s at. This is a detail of a larger painting I’m working on.
"Not knowing how to do it is part of knowing how to do it." - Leon Kossoff 