Figure Drawing April 28

I got to Life Drawing late - and missed the first pose. Worse, setting up in a hurry, and jumping into drawing without any mental transition from my rush through traffic, unbalanced me. So the first sketches were largely a loss.

But I discovered something interesting. Our model was a beautiful young woman, with a nearly perfect figure and ideal proportions. There were so many lovely details: the slight curve of her forearms, the shape of her hands, her chin, the mulitiple curves of her hip bones, her elbows, her calves... I would have liked twenty minutes, for instance, on the 5 minute pose on the left side of the first photo (above). We have not drawn anyone this young or ideal that I can recall, and it was surprisingly difficult for me. It was like trying to capture a blank slate - a body upon which life hasn't drawn much yet. It made me realize that I focus on some unusual aspect of each figure - such as the long torso and prominent joints of our last model. So I struggled here. First of all because there were so many distracting details, and mostly because there was so little surface feature on her smooth, young body. It's harder to place breasts in a drawing, for instance, when they have no distinct shadows or edges - there is no obvious line of reference for connecting them with the rest of the drawing. And there are fewer hints of the bones in a younger body - and the bones are the cues that provide structure for figure drawing, the frame on which all the muscles and weight are balanced.

The second photo here is of the two twenty minute poses. These are not particularly large (the page is less than 18 by 24) and yet I didn't get as far as I would have liked. At least I finally was understanding what I was drawing, and was making some progress. Then, as usual, time's up. I always feel worn out and stiff; that I couldn't do another pose - and I always feel that I finally was getting somewhere and wishing there were one more pose...