drawn along in the wake

Hey so I may be terrible at getting things posted, but I am not behind on my sketchbook, I swear! (Well, not very.) So I will go on and upload things for the next few days until I am caught up on both– it’ll just mean an extra trip or two to the Art Institute.

Also– we produce a huge volume of drawings in my Figure Drawing class and are expected to pick out the three or four best every few weeks to turn in for actual grading! And this week is the first week we’re doing that, so I will post the ones I actually end up turning in, how’s that, Internet?

Anyway, my last Seurat copy. Somehow the stippling turned out terrible– nowhere near as good as the other two, possibly because I actually did this on the tail of a bunch of other stuff and my leg was cramping– but the hair looks pretty good. Why is this my life.

Three pages of observation– one from group therapy, two from a meeting. I think I want to try drawing at group again this week– it’s a tiny group but no one minds, and even from this you can tell that everyone’s body language is so distinctive.

And from the meeting: I don’t know why everyone moved around so much more in a meeting than in therapy, but I had to draw a lot faster. Weirdly, my favorite is the girl with the glasses in the lower left of the second page– it’s the loosest scribbliest thing ever, but damn if it doesn’t look just like her.

And three Michelangelo copies. They aren’t very thorough copies, because I like to limit myself to 30-40 minutes on a copy (more like an hour for the Seurats, because stippling is such a pain in the ass). Which I totally do not regulate by watching Star Trek and doing one drawing an episode, and you will never prove that I do– anyway, I thought Michelangelo would be nice and straightforward and useful to copy, but it turns out unsurprisingly that he is INTIMIDATING AS FUCK. In retrospect these aren’t that bad, especially the first, but if they all look kind of like I gave up mid-drawing I’m sorry to say it’s because I did. There is so much detail in there, and all the forms are so emphatically modeled, that it’s really difficult to simplify the figure and sort out which lines and shadows are really important to making a recognizable figure vs. which are Michelangelo being enthusiastic about detail.

I almost wish I’d saved the links to these images; I’d like to try them again when I’m feeling more confident.

I had never done IRL observational drawing of people before. That shit is hard. People on my Google Reader are always posting these really effective, detailed little sketches of strangers around them, and I have no idea how you can produce a drawing that effective in the like five seconds before your subject stands up and wanders away. I know, I know, it’s a practice thing.

In other news: stippling. The original drawings I copied weren’t stippled, but they were Seurat, and done on heavily textured paper, so I thought I might as well. Thus: adventures in markmaking.

It took me until like halfway through the first drawing to get really tired of stippling. The effect is really great when it works (and I do like this one a lot!)

By the time I had made serious progress on this second, I kind of wanted to throw out every drawing implement I own that has a point. Give me charcoal, oh my god, and brushes and ink and stuff I can smear everywhere. Hence the background on this one, which . . . self, when will you learn that deliberately varying the markmaking in a drawing never looks nearly as awesome as you think it will?

There is a third drawing waiting to be copied, but I cannot cope with it right now. Too many dots. o_o It will sit open in a tab, making me guilty, until I deal with it over the weekend or something.