Drawings from Europe!

(Don't worry, I'm aware of the irony of the last post title. I plan on making a post about my current artmaking and general state of mine soon, but for now, have some things I drew on my trip to Amsterdam and Paris!)

Drawing at the Met

I'm working on a new post, about discipline and preparedness and overcoming disgust in oneself when it becomes apparently those things are absent --

-- but since that's taking a while, here are some drawings I did at the Met yesterday.

 

I am really usually not so successful with these types of studies. Perhaps I just hit the right way to render, and the right size? The top one is the length of my thumb, the bottom one a little bigger.

SVA Life Drawing 9/24 and 10/22

Last Monday, I went to another SVA model session. It was really excellent! I mean, I'm not excellent at it, but it was a great few hours. One of the things that happened between sessions, though, was my looking through the drawings I'd done from the previous model session. Not the last one I posted - but the one after it, which had been a terrible few hours for me, but which didn't actually yield the horrible, awful drawings I'd thought at the time.

2- and 5-minute poses

5-minute poses

5- and 10-minute poses

10- and 20-minute poses

Those are all from the 9/24 session. They're not the greatest - I took a long, long time to warm up, and every set feels behind: the 5 min posess look like 2s, the 10s look like 5s, the 20s look like 10s - but you know, there are some nice moments in these pages.

Then I didn't go back for a month.

2-minute poses

2- and 5-minute poses

5-minute poses

10- and 20-minute poses

These are from the 10/22 session. I'm really pleased to see the difference between the September and October drawings, because there's definitely more confidence and ease in them, for all that my gesture still leaves quite a lot to be desired.

I'd be going again this week but there's sort of a hurricane, so.

SVA Life Drawing 9/17

SVA has weekly free model sessions for students and alum, and I am going to be doing my level best to attend as many as I can! This week was the first time I've drawn from a live model in, uh. Five-ish months. So of a three-hour session, only these four poses are really worth showing.

10 min poses

20 min poses

As obviously rusty as I am here, I'm really pleased... mostly because this -

- is what I did at my last model session, five months ago, for the 10 and 20 minute poses.

The change in my linework and markmaking is striking to me, and what's especially interesting to me is the fact that I have my drawing-a-day project to thank for that. The way I draw has changed and streamlined to a point where it's usually actively enjoyable, where before drawing was a needful chore on average - something I was good at but took little joy in.

As far as I can tell, it has to do with letting go, or trusting myself, or confidence, or a combination of all three. The first line doesn't have to be perfect, nor does it have to be feather-light in case it's wrong; I can take as many passes on a shape as I need, and describing form with hatching without hesitation because if I'm wrong I just erase it and try again. I also apparently figured out how to find middle steps between the blank mask-face (+/- placeholder features, like on the middle figure from the old session) and a painstakingly drawn portrait.

Anyway, all of this is just a sort of congratulatory post to myself on improvement, and some thoughts on the specifics and reasons. It's helpful to think 'out loud', and beyond that this kind of post turns out to be a really invaluable time-capsule for my artistic journey. Thanks for reading, if you did!

In the wings...

The thumbs for all of my current/future illustration projects, in no particular order and with no context (unless you can read my notes to myself - the full files are large enough, though my handwriting is its own beast).

They're not much to look at, especially because I'm being less thorough than I should be, but I'm very excited! The first two or three are probably going to be more extensively thumbed once I let them simmer for a little while longer on the backbrain, but the last two, which are all for the same project, have actually already moved into sketch-and-reference stage. You'll be seeing more of that soon enough...

Sketchbook Pages pt. 2

Continuing from Part One, my sketchbook! Now with more celtic knotwork and life drawing sessions.

Sketchbook Pages pt. 1

Since we're having some technical difficulties in photographing my new paintings properly, have some sketchbook pages! This is about half of the used part of my sketchbook, and there's a little bit of everything from doodles to nude model sessions to thumbnails to idea scribbles to drawing on the train. The first pages are from early-mid last year - November or December - up through this past summer.