One of the key things I keep trying to maintain and improve by drawing regularly is speed. I’ve shown you drawings of various sorts here, but maybe not enough of the experiments I try to do relatively quickly. When things are working well and my eye is in, so to speak, shapes and lines jump out at me and beg to be put on to the paper, and a convincing form appears, giving a sense of the pose that was being done at the time. This can be someone on the train, or it can be a model in a studio I’ve dropped in to draw for a while.

I sort of love incomplete drawings that are a mixture of schematic structures, implied flow, more finished forms, and so forth. The results can be quite fun to look at. Above is a bunch I did last week. Click for a much larger view. (I apologize for the copyright watermark in everything, but I’m tired of the business people have on the […] Click to continue reading this post →

While on a hiding retreat in another town or city, I like to seek out a local group that might be doing a “drop in and draw” session. You show up, pay your money, and there’s a safe environment (in a studio, a back room, upstairs of a pub, etc) for a model and artists to work on the wonderful business of capturing the human form in various media. I’m a reasonably private person so I like to keep the anonymity level reasonably high, but it does not only work. People are of course on the watch out to protect the group from perceived problems, so they ask questions. Others are just trying to make friends, and so they ask questions too. I just like to be polite and friendly, share the odd joke or remark, but mostly keep my mouth shut and listen to the various small talk that breaks out during breaks. Most of all, I want to get on with the business of drawing.

I went to one on Monday. This time around it was sort of amusing to me at one point when one of the organisers of the group asked me why I’d come down from LA to their small seaside town drawing group and I said I was hiding. I could sense alarm immediately (I can imagine the pictures he might have had in his mind even before I said “hiding”) and so I then went further, by way of reassurance, and said something vague but standard about wanting to get out […] Click to continue reading this post →

Well, yes, I’ve been very busy with several things. After clearing away a lot of them, I decided last night that it had been long enough since I’d visited a “drop in and draw” studio to practice figure drawing, and so I went along. (I’ve written about this on previous occasions…you drop in, pay a fee towards the model’s salary, and then you draw. You can find such studios in your own city if you wish. There’s nothing like live figure drawing for practicing observation, hand-eye coordination, and a host of other skills that need regular maintenance.)

Anyway, I dropped in, said hi, started up some Kate Bush (“The Sensual World”) on the ipod (followed by Mayte Martin – “Al Cantar a Manuel”) and I drew. A great and […] Click to continue reading this post →

But I sort of like them like that. It is a busy time, but I thought I needed to do something different and so last night I popped into a studio I visit to do a “drop in and draw” session. I’ve told you about these before. There were not too many other sketchers there, which is nice, and it was also nice to have a model that was not the usual (often tedious to draw) thin sort, but who had lots of interesting forms that played well with the light. This makes drawing interesting. (Click for larger view.)

I was rusty, not having done this in a bit, but rusty in an interesting way – I was seeing forms and getting balance fairly well (with some obvious proportion issues […] Click to continue reading this post →