another saturday morning ironing

Conversation taking place in home of The Artist:

Family Member of The Artist "What (crazy demented activity now) are you doing?"
The Artist (author of this blog) "I am ironing my drawing."
"Why?"(questioner knows that Artist hates ironing )(see below*)
The Artist replies, "I need to iron this drawing so that I can get it to lie flat enough on my scanner."
"Why do you have to iron your artwork?" Family Member still doesn't understand.
Artist replies, patiently, "This drawing is wrinkled because I painted over the pencil work on the paper and the wrinkles show up when I scan it and I want to post this art on my blog, without the wrinkles."
Family Member, "Oh, can you iron this shirt for me too?"



(*) This Artist also hates cooking and most housekeeping chores.

drawing lines

It is all lines, just lovely lines.

Let the object draw the picture using the ink brush as a tool.
(Chinese saying) 














Pen and ink line drawing, part of a series of Joan of Arc poses from a model in a drawing class.

re-pose

A five-minute warm up gesture drawing.

gestures from Life

Five minutes for warm-up poses in Life Drawing class. We do five of these poses in rapid succession and when I pull them out weeks later, I enjoy them in a fresh way.

repose

poet

"The impermanence of everything;

Nothing can ever happen twice.

In consequence,

the sorry fact is

 that we arrive

here improvised

and leave without

the chance to practice."

Poet Wislawa Szymborka won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. She died last month, and because of obituaries and tributes, only now has brought her work to my attention. How marvelous the skill with which she would weave complex thoughts into a few clear words.

Above, a five minute gesture pose from life drawing group.

Today

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear
and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.

Poet Wislawa Szymborka

life pose

I am pleased with the result of my Life drawing/painting class this past week.

gesture drawings

These are the warm-ups. Five minute poses that our model takes with a little more action included than they could sustain for a longer pose. I concentrate on dynamic angles, basic shapes, and sometimes try to visualize the skeleton under the skin.

more from life

Today we worked on studying the muscles of the back. I still struggle with keeping all that back stuff, bumps and ridges straight. What is confusing is that it all changes completely when the model moves, twists, stands up, or reaches. Those scapular angles are always challenging.

right side drawing

I began drawing with a new group this week. We are starting with the basics which I am really enjoying because I need to review and refresh my knowledge and technique.
Today we did the beginner exercise called blind contour drawing. This method is meant to engage the right side of your brain and to tell the left side to go to sleep or shut up. You must use a marker or something that cannot be erased. And you must draw very slowly, looking at your subject and Never look down at your paper the whole time. I found it best if I did not lift my marker during the process and just made one continuous line.
I call it "drawing blind". Only you aren't blind, you are just blind to what is one the paper.
When you finally stop and look down, sometimes the result can be quite a pleasant surprise, and sometimes, it is just a mess of lines. The important thing is what is going on in your brain, not the drawing itself.
We had a model sitting in front of us, I started with the skeleton that was standing next to him.
There are two continuous line drawings shown here.
And then the next drawing can be executed with allowing yourself to occasionally glance at your paper, but to continue to draw very slowly with mostly one continuous line. This of course actually looks like the model but has a quality of life that a sketch usually doesn't achieve.

if I lived in Hawaii

...or San Diego, Florida, or Santa Fe; I wouldn't be in such a hurry to draw these hibiscus from life in my own garden. But I must hurry, October has its own deadline here in the Chicago area.

life from the back

Sometimes the back side of my subject is as fascinating to me as the other views. Here, a life drawing posed from the back.

And another of one of my favorite subjects showing all the intricacy of the back view.

faces

After the modeling session ended, this gentleman revealed to me that he is 85 years old. I would have thought he was younger, maybe at the end of his 70s. Shows how incredibly different the aging process is for each individual. As it is with the endlessly different life stories written on each face.

old life

(edited life drawing from one of my class sessions)
A thought I have been mulling over is about my attraction to the withered and old in my art. I like to draw a flower that has been around for days or even weeks in my studio. Every day that passes gives me a changing subject to look at, consider from different angles. I sometimes wait until a petal is drooping way over and the edges are curled up before it becomes so interesting that I just have to stop everything and draw it from life.

And the same thing is with people, as I visit the nursing home several times a week, I see people who have, with the passing of time, become so visually interesting. I am constantly looking and thinking, how would I portray that? How do I paint or draw that fascinating withering and drooping to show what I really see and feel.

life drawing session on a rainy saturday

I worked so very hard for the first couple of hours getting warmed up. The model had a very jumpy soundtrack playing on a boombox, making me nervous, some rap, some hiphop, and I was sure I wasn't going to turn out any sort of a drawing  that day.

I spent the first two hours yelling inside my head (encouraging instructive stuff at myself), and then it all happened in the last hour, just as some mellow music came on the studio soundtrack. Maybe it was the folk rock, but it all came together. Drawing is hard, you must keep working at it steadily from the ugly uncertain bits on to the finish.

head drawing class again

I went to another session this week. It is hard to get back into the discipline if you have been out of it. It is like my exercise routine of running 3 or 4 miles, I never want to stop because I don't want to have to start up again-it is just too hard. These drawing sessions are hard, intense, and exhausting. And I love it.
Here, I used watercolor pencils for a 20 minute pose.

An interesting drawing quote

"Any object can be drawn, although those which have been formed by nature or affected by long use will offer the greatest amount of variation, as a flower, a stone, a piece of fruit, or an old shoe."

Kimon Nicolaides "The Natural Way to Draw"

My closest, most frequently used model, my own hand, drawn in my sketchbook.

drawing class

I haven't posted in a month. Yikes.
And I haven't been drawing a lot, not as much as I should.
Excuses like the wedding and re-arranging my studio don't hold up to my insistence that any drawing student must practice constantly.

I went to an open drawing session with a head model this  week. Just to get in some practice. Actually, I drew her entire figure, but here is my result from the head pose.

And here is the warm-up sketch that I did first. I was also using the session to teach a young art student how to begin a pose, with axis lines, relative measurements and blocking in.

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