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some key areas to work on

Hey folks!

After yammering about it all the damn time, Rebecca Junkin and I started up life drawing. To hell with treckin down to the art school and paying for a chance to draw someone in the nude. We’re now officially drawing each other every Tuesday Night (and checking out a gallery opening if one’s happening!).

Both of us draw frequently (well ok, she’s fairing better than I) but it didn’t take long in our first session to realize how quickly we forgot all our formal training and churned out tight, not quite satisfying drawings. Itemized below are few fundamentals we forgot. Too bad it cost us $25,000+  to forget

LIFE DRAWING TIPS

Tip #1) Get your eyes off the damn paper!

The coordination between hand and eye is a wonderful thing, but it suffers when you’re too busy watching every line you make. Try to look as little at your paper/drawing surface as possible, especially as you lay down your first lines. Look at the model as much as possible, and let your hands ‘trace along’ with your eyes. Like blind contouring.  It loosens up the lines and itis amazing at how quickly you can develop a good eye at distinguishing distance between features!

Tip #2) Don’t zero in on one little area

So you’ve drawn a rough idea of what you’re looking at, and by God you’ve made an exquisite armpit without even trying! Pat yourself on the back for being so lucky, and move on. Its very easy to get caught up on a part you like, only to over-do it and find out you spent 13 mins shading a great kneecap that doesn’t have any relation to the monstrosity of  a leg you drew. Working all over parts of the drawing helps define it more quickly.

Tip #3) Keep it loose

Similar to rule #2, the point in drawing is generally not to get specific in the first few marks. Especially in life drawing: foreshorten features, twists in arms, curves of spines, etc. have energy about them (unless you’re drawing a cadaver, you lucky bastard). The looser your drawing, the more you’re speaking to the tension of muscles and can correctly tackle shadows. You can always edit out lines later, and this frees you’re mind from feeling like you have a drawing instructor breathing down you neck  to finish the whole thing in 5 minutes.

Tip #4) Get out of your comfort zone

I hate arms. They have such subtle twists and are connected to the even harder to draw hand. For a full term at NSCAD I didn’t draw them. Sometimes I’d draw imaginary potted plants that were in the way, just to save the humiliation of showing off sausage-digits attached to Gumby’s limbs. But this year I vow to pay attention to my weakness. You can only improve if you practice, and who knows - maybe figuring out how to correctly shade a jaw line will help you master you’r already killer renderings of elbows.

Tip #5) Shade and do line work at the same time

I’m bad for ignoring this one. I tend to do all my contours and then go back and add the shading. But often the result looks just like that: labored line work with spotty shading thrown in. Contours are great for deciding shape, but mass is also important for describing the human form. Sometimes you can draw a leg and rework it and rework it but it doesn’t seem to connect to the ankle. All it needed was some shading at the calf to help you to figure out how to correct the contour to the ankle.