Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Heads and Faces I





The human head, in all its complexities, is often the main visual subject of my more lengthy drawing projects (check out my website, link on the right…) Drawing portraits directly from the live model is always a bit of a game of chess. The basic components of the task seem simple and rather straight forward (a nose is a nose is a nose), but their combinations and nuances are endless. I will often draw a model four or five times before I get even close to capturing a likeness.

Capturing continual motion





These are a few drawings from motion exercises I set up with my Advanced Drawing class this past semester. We were playing with trapping continual motion, something you often come across when drawing regular people on the street or at a coffee shop, but rarely encounter in the life drawing studio. (After all, we do pay the models to sit still…) For each exercise I had the model slowly perform a repeated action: stacking books on a table, pouring water from a jug, hurling a pillow across the room. The drawings that resulted show how visual memory, repetition, and economy of form start to give the idea of staccato motion (perhaps something like from a silent movie…)

Bodies that hold space...





Most of my drawings show the full body, head to toe, volumetrically rendered. I once had a great professor who said something along the lines of “You want your drawings to look plastic, like you could reach into the picture frame and grab an arm or a leg and manipulate it…” That may be taking it a bit far, but I do draw with the goal of making bodies that look solid, as if they hold real space. No one trick achieves this illusion; it is a combination of pushing value, using hints of perspective, and editing out “flattening” details that may confuse the eye.