My Art Workshop

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.

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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 🙂

Back to figure drawing. It’s interesting that after a break from these, I find that suddenly some parts, I used to struggle with, are now easier to do. And some parts are harder to do, like getting a sketch done within the 1 or 2 mins time limit.

I am fairly happy with how this turned out. I did not “cheat” by stopping the video this time, and I think I still got the important parts of the poses noted down during the time available.

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At today´s drawings I used the same resource as yesterday. Today though I was in a silly mood, so I went for all the fast poses using only my left hand.

I haven’t had to write or draw anything with that, since I broke my right arm in the last Millennium! It was so funny doing this, and I did not care one bit if the result was pretty, I just had great fun with the task. For the last, longer pose I switched to my right hand. That one is OK, but I still think the others are way more fun.
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More croquis drawing. For these I varied the timing for the poses a lot. It was so much fun drawing the woman with the insanely long hair. The shorthaired one today was really really hard since she was muscular and kinda squarish so I kept drawing her too masculine. It was a challenge, but I still like how it turned out in the end.

For all of these I used the Croquis Cafe on Youtube. A great free resource of human models to choose from and I can draw whenever I feel like it. It has less of the “perfect model picture” syndrom my other croquis resource was driving me nuts with, plus it names the models and each session has severel poses with the same model. I like that, it makes the drawings more engaged, I think.

Today I went back to the figure drawing. I am fairly pleased with how it turned out for 5 mins work. Here’s to a lot of drawing in 2015!

I found a new croquis site on Youtube. The models are a lot less pretty models and a lot more normal people. I like that, it’s so much more fun to draw. Each session is 4 one mins poses, 4 two mins poses and one longer pose in the end. That one is supposed to be 5 mins, but I stop the video to finish it off so it’s more like 5 -7 mins really.

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Today quick poses as usual. But this is the first time for a while, I actually used a real pencil and paper. What a relief! I thought I was getting my Wacom pen tamed. But drawing with a real pencil is just so much easier. So I bought a sketchbook. I will still be practicing the Wacom pen, especially since it’s so easy to find a picture in Google, and just draw right here at the computer. But I will definitely be filling my sketchbook with real drawings too.

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Back to the full figure quickposes, 30 sec each. And as a new challenge: Mouths without any time limit on those.

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The past many days I have had so much fun with those quick poses and posting on Tumblr. Watching what other people draw and getting a bit of feedback is really motivating.

So today I did the quickposes for around half an hour, 60 sec/pose. I then drew one pose with no time limit. That one was fun too. I might break it up like this from now on, doing a bunch of fast poses first and then one drawing, where I can play with shadows and refine the form and movement a bit.

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I’m technically challenged today I think.

I was ready to do the quickposes and attacked the first pose with enthusiasm. I drew like crazy and kept drawing and thought: ”Wow! I am getting good at this!” As time went by, I had to realize that it was not really me, who had got much faster. I had forgotten to set a time limit in the pose sketching program. So the first reference picture just showed on my screen forever, instead of switching to the next picture, when time was up. I ended up doing a rather slow quickpose.

Still I had decided to do quickposes today. So, soon I was at it again. Around 60 poses from Quickposes.com. I thought I was in a terrible hurry today. No wonder. I had set the program to switch reference every 30 sec instead of the 60 sec I usually do. I did not notice until I was all done 😀

Now I just have to do the assignment my kid gave me: “Watch a James Bond movie, pause it somewhere with action and draw the scene.” Cool idea huh?