25 March 2009

Life drawing, week 6

Negative space - the spaces between objects. While we were scribbling lightly to cover the paper, and starting to draw - in a continuous line, measuring the negative space by drawing across it - not just the model but everything behind her in the room, Kate was stringing up a grid all over the room - Halfway through the evening, after looking and measuring and looking and drawing and looking some more, I'd had to move the model a considerable distance to the right, and make her (and that stool) much larger - several times, to the point of total confusion, and was allowed to do a little rubbing out so as to see what I was drawing -
The exciting part came when we defined the background with "aerial perspective" - making it blurrier with a little rubbing out. And the foreground got a lot of rubbing out, to make the white highlights, and darkening of lines, and added shading -
Some other views of the room -
And that was the final life drawing class. Though I've always said "I'm not interested in drawing people, oh no" and avoided life drawing generally, I found it really interesting - and invigorating - and feel that I've made some progress in being able to depict a person so they look normally proportioned. After (quite) a bit more practice - more looking, more doing, more looking at what's done and at what needs to be done next - I might be able to depict identifiable individuals (or fingers that don't look like sausages) - an exciting prospect!

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