I had the best weekend ever! Thanks mom this was truly an amazing gift 🙂 I spend 3 days drawing in Viborg at The Animation Workshop.
Hours and hours of drawing from live models. It was a challenge to stay concentrated that long, but I loved every moment of it. And best of all: I see very clear progress in my figure drawing from day to day.
Friday early evening we went straight for the charcoal and tried to keep up with the fast pace of the poses. We started out with 10 seconds drawings and went on to 30 secs. Getting the drawings sized correctly to actually fit on the paper was a challenge, most of my attempts were lacking feet at this point.
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Then my teacher, Iben Lindeberg, came by and had a look at what I was doing. Her suggestion was to turn the charcoal on the side and roughly block in the figure before I started the linework. It worked instantly. From then on I did not have to struggle with size and could focus on getting flow, energy and balance into my drawings. At the same time I got a more fleshy look even though at this point the blocking in at first only was a matter of getting the size right.
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Saturday I started out playing with my new trick. It’s great, and it gave me time to really study the form of the figure, where the hips start and where the legs attach. What shapes head, hands and feet have. What the main line of action is through a pose, and where the weight is, and all that stuff there is to study when doing croquis.
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I had fun with that all morning. After lunch though I decided it was time to move on to new challenges. Again my teacher helped me out suggesting that after I had done the lines of my figures I used my charcoal to flesh out the forms. That’s hard! I really struggled, since using the side of a piece of charcoal instead of the pointy end is really hard to control, and it did not always leave color, where I wanted it. But overall it was definitely a step up compared to my previous drawings, and I was happy when I went home that day.
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Sunday I started out playing again with what I had learnt. It generally went well, but I did not like that my drawings turned so very dark, that even though I did all the shadows, the lines still made the drawing look rather flat and not very elegant.
I struggled with it, but had trouble finding a solution. In the lunch break I spoke to a second teacher, and he told me that lines are not real, they are just symbols helping the eye to interpret a form. Sometimes they are better left out completely. The eye will fill in the blanks with a minimum of symbols.
Also my teacher, who had helped me the other days, told me, that the eye likes contrasts. You will interpret stuff with high contrast as being close to you, where as stuff with less contrast will seem to be further away. I decided I would play with this, when we started drawing again.
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This was great fun again! I started with leaving out the lines more or less completely and only do the figures with the side of the charcoal. It turned out mostly terrible, but in a few figures it really worked well.
Then I started adding lines remembering they were symbols. I made them very simple and only used them sparingly to underline a movement. These last drawings I really really like. I think I managed to capture both movement and proportions, but also light and shadow. The drawings are way more elegant than what I had produced until now – yay!
I managed to learn new stuff every single day of this weekend 🙂
