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!