Early morning and I am face-to-face with my young lady. The first task I completed was darkening the dark tones and eliminating the tiny black "blobs" and "halos" with a kneaded eraser. Yes, I was told to "go darker". Can you believe it? Then I went to work on the halftone areas. I made the mistake of going for the detail right away and had to erase most of it. I need to treat the "egg" shape of the face and the "cylinder" of the neck in a simplistic, graphic way first. Once this is in, I can begin to work the edges and achieve the true shape. General to detail. That is the mantra here. Some days feel like "two steps forward and one step back"!
The homework was more small drawings of arms and hands in a separate sketchbook. The homework is turned in and we awarded points. The points allow us to choose our easel position for the model. The person with the most points has first choice. There are several of us with the same number of points, so I let the people who will stay on take the better positions. It doesn't matter to me where I am , the "bad" positions just present me with different problems to work out. If you always choose the easy route, you won't learn something new.
This is the two-day afternoon pose. This exercise was in preparation for the next two weeks. Starting Monday, we will have one pose for two weeks. It will be a completely rendered figure. This drawing that you see below, has the dark shadow areas filled in and the halftones begin on the feet and gradually lighten as you move up the figure. I worked a lot on the face. It is close to the model, but not quite him. I was happy that it looked human! Unfortunately, the face is a topic of the next term. It is my weakest area.
We had a guest artist visit the school - James Gurney. He is the author/artist of "Dinotopia" paintings, drawings and books. A very interesting man. He makes complete mock-up sets of the dinosaurs and settings for his full-scale paintings. Check out his blog - GurneyJourney.blogspot.com. Of particular interest would be his thumbnail sketches. His sketchbook was filled with postage stamp size sketches! He carries a sketchbook everywhere he goes. The sketches we saw were from his train ride into Florence. The sketches from a train trip in France are on his blog site. Inspirational.
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