Tonight went a little better, if only because it wouldn’t have been possible to do much worse than last night. Round two with this model, and I did come away with a couple I’m reasonably OK with. A few stinkers too, just to keep it real.
This was a three-hour session at the college, a smaller session than I’ve seen there so far. Looks like they might try to keep these weekly through the winter semester, so hopefully I can get to a lot of them. I hope they switch them back to Thursday though.
Started off with a series of untimed short poses. They were around 2 minutes each. I actually like this better than the opening one- minute poses in the Monday sessions – one minute is just enough to throw the roughest of outline down in, but two gives you a chance to do a small amount of quick refining and get a better gesture.
I liked this one – why oh why can’t we have a pose like this for 50 minutes? Well, I know why, it would be impossible to hold. I can still complain wistfully, though.
Yeah, for two minutes, I felt like most of these were working.
This one not so much.
Drawing guiding lines for orientation was helping a little tonight, although this one was pretty out of whack anyway.
Judging by the fact that I got a little way into shading and then ran out of time, I’d say this was the first five.
This five was a disaster. She isn’t actually a troll.
This one was ten, and while I like the angle and her face, I’m a little baffled now at how I didn’t get more done in ten minutes.
This one was 20, and I think it’s the first one I’ve managed to get to look a little like her. Pretty satisfied with this one overall given its time constraints.
During the break I wandered a little and saw some JAW-DROPPINGLY good drawings on other people’s easels, including a closeup portrait that was a devastating likeness of her. Jesus, there are some talented artists in this group. I slunk back and decided to try one myself. Let’s just say that it is rather less good than the ones I saw. Argh.
This one was around 25. I should have done it much bigger so I could have done finer shading. The spotlighting on her was quite dramatic and I just didn’t have the resolution to get it here.
For the last one, I thought I’d try it on better paper and see how it went. This is 70lb Strathmore drawing paper, 300 series. It’s got some tooth, and by this time my 4B was pretty worn down and so it took on an almost charcoalish quality. Click for full size, but even at full size I couldn’t get very much detail and the whole thing felt kind of rough. Not necessarily bad, but I don’t think I took proper advantage of either the pose or the medium.
She had fallen asleep here when I got to her head; later on she awoke and straigtened up a little, so I couldn’t really go back and shade her face better because the light on it was much different. Ah well. Although it doesn’t look like 50 minutes of work, I guess it’s not the worst I’ve done.
This group will hopefully squeeze off one more session next week, between xmas and new year’s, and then we’ll see how things go in January, but there will be a bit less of this for a couple of weeks. I’ll have to post some code or something in the meantime. :P
