How my first life drawing practice went

I found a life drawing event in my area

and I had to go!

All the artist emphasis the importance of drawing from life, and you would think, yes of course it is important to practice, and I may just practice in my style, use other peoples life drawing to copy or why not just taking photo reference.

To really bring it to the point, you need to teach your eye to see what there is, not what you think there is. Art and photos from other people show you what they see and that is rarely what you would see yourself.

My goal was to look at the model and just draw exactly what I see. And that is harder than you think. We do build a version of the world in our head and live through filtering out all the things that we already think we know how they work so we can focus on something unusual. This way of living and drawing is prone to wrong perspectives, and odd repetitive mistakes. I have done it myself a thousand times. The other thing is, we also miss out on the opportunity to add new knowledge. Think about it, when was the last time you have payed attention on how many fingers there are on the hand... maybe when you were 2, right? Have you updated your knowledge since then? You drew the hand back than as a square with 5 carrots sticking out and maybe today you wonder why your hand drawing sucks.

 You have to draw what you see 

and correct the model of the object 

you build in your head.

So, there I was, sitting in the room with the nude drawing model in front. I see the body, but I can't see the model. All my anatomy knowledge was distracting me from drawing what I see. So I implemented a trick.

I started drawing shapes, 

negative space shapes,

and I compared measurements  

I started drawing the things I didn't know. That is the shapes around the body. It was completely new to me how the body fills up the space and as I brought my brains attention to something new and unusual, I was able to really see what there is.  How the arm holding the hip builds a triangle, the big square made out of both legs and the floor. This helped me to go through even most challenging poses. Because this way, I never asked myself, how I learned the arm is jointed up the the shoulder, or how are the hips positioned on the chair, i just drew shapes that I could see.

2 min poses: Here still thinking too much about shoulder joining up, torso being three heads high, etc...

10 min poses: Slowly finding the shapes around the body and working in big lines. The back and bottom are one tilted line, the arms and chair another, all builds a triang.e

20 min poses: Finally I am drawing what I see, there are triangles, s-curves, bony rounds

By the end of the class, I was able to draw what I see. And it worked so well. I then implemented that way of looking also on observing the shades. What shapes are the darkest part of the shade, how long and dark is it compared to the rest. 

About the class programm

At the start the poses were 2-5min long, and then the model changed the pose. This time was just enough to warm up to the paper and to start concentrating. The next set of poses was held 10 min, and that was for just too long for a quick sketch and just too short for working out the details. The 20min poses were brilliant, as you had enough time to start with the rough shapes and then work out smaller shapes and more detailed shapes that would finally form the body.

Coloured light sources are tricky

Work
The storyboard for "Africa" is finished and send in. I will be waiting for the comments. In the mean time I am working on some Ankara pattern. It will be a very colorful book!

Exercise
There is not much to say. I am continuing my training in shading and lighting and have at least two things to focusing on atm.

- Is the object 3D and correct? Did I get the right shape, did I block in the correct shades and lights parts? Do I communicate the right information about the object?

- Including special light sources. I am trying to understand how colour influences each other and am including some special effects. So, for example, this girl (foto below) with her orange shirt is sitting next to some apparent blue light and her orange top and skin tone will be influenced. I can't just mix orange and blue, as this will give me a muddy green and I have no experience how it looks in real life. So I am looking at light color wheel. The colours mix different when they are coming from a light. We remeber that taking all colours together we will get white. So, I am trying to figure out what colour I would see if I get to mix orange light and blue light... gray, turquoise?

Do the colours show different light sources? The blue light from the letters shines on her neck and through the t-shirt arm. But will it really hit all the folds in the same strength as I painted it here?

Are the values correct? Check in black and white if the shades are strong enough and if the object feels 3D. Here the folds are fine, but the whole shirt does not appear to wrap around her body. It needs to be a bit darker around the tummy area.

Strong tint water colour and lighting exercise

work
I finished book JO (JO is a working alias), a story about a family that is just the mum and son, in August. The proofs have been send back to me for a check and everything looked fabulous. Now we just have to wait for the printing production. I am sitting on hot charcoal and can't wait to share the pictures, once the book is published.

The next book project is about the African culture. I did a handful messy paintings as a warm up training and posted them here below.

There is a big difference to my usual art. My usual pictures are quite pale, which was alright for Caucasian babies. To be honest I was always a bit worried to ruin the picture with a wrong placed shadow so I would work with very light washes. But that just wouldn't work for dark skinned babies. I had to soak my brush in paint and just go for it. And if you are not confident enough, they say "fake it till you make it!" And that is what I played by. The result is quite alright.

exercise
Time to get that value right! I have been watching these videos by top artists explaining value, and shade, ambient light, direct light, core shadows, cast shadows.... It's a whole library of words, and I am slowly getting the grips of a hand full of them.

In my work I just started to separate the way I deal with form shadow v.s. cast shadow. The first is to bring the 3-D feeling of the object to life, and the latter is to bring that object into context with the surrounding, where an other object throws a shadow on to it, or itself is throwing a shadow on other things. The little picture below shows the difference.

These shadows are influenced by the light around them of course, so I always have to ask where is the light source and what parts of the object does it hit?

It involves a lot of thinking at the beginning, but I am sure it will become natural soon.