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 web of just taking things and reposting them or incorporating them into other things without crediting their sources. This practice gives me some ammo on occasion when I stumble upon my stuff on some other site.) These are between 2 and 5 minute poses, with semi-soft pencil on basic drawing paper. (And Hendrix playing.) Each figure is about 6 to 10 inches tall or wide, to make sure that I’m using big sweeping motions in the drawing… My favourite is the one at the bottom right. Of course, it was one of the quickest. I sort of threw it out onto the paper in no more than about 100 seconds and then just stopped. Knowing when to stop is a skill I hope to master one day… All of this of course feeds usefully into The Project.
Perhaps I’ll share some longer poses with you later on this weekend. It’s been a while.
-cvj
