Studies from Sittings...

Human models asked to sit for portrait studies either are friends and acquaintances or are hired professional models.
From my experience the hired model will endure longer sitting lengths than friends do. As well, professionals are so used to being looked at intensely for extended perions of time that of expression to take over their they tend to relax into poses to the point of allowing a range of expression in their visage as they sit, quite unselfconscious.
Friends and family, on the other hand, tend to pose, to present their best face - their "game face" - unless they don't invest greatly in the outcome, the resulting study.
One cannot let the expectations of the model influence the action of seeing, studying and responding to a particular human face or form. If the one drawing is not able to fully engage in the act of seeing and drawing, then the freedom with which to make marks is compromised.
This drawing of a young woman model allowed me enough comfort to "attack" the drawing with vigour and to use charcoal in a direct manner. 18in. by 24in. compressed charcoal on cartridge.

Found Images and Text

You come upon a fragment from a photograph, perhaps a relatively small, unimportant section. It evokes thought and feelings for you. You slice it out with your ex-acto knife, sit with it in front of you and let that fragmentary image move your awareness in a number of different directions. Maybe, right then, your mind courses and leaps about, makes all kinds of connections. Before you know it, your awareness of time passing disappears and you have sat, contemplating a series of unrelated ideas. You are, right then, undecided as to where you want to let this image take you, how you might want to incorporate it into your daily practice. So, you file it away, maybe in your sketchbook or daily journal. From time to time as you open these storehouses of your ideas drawings and scraps of image you pass by this image and it arrests your attention.

Later, this bit of visual stimulus lies on your awareness like a burr does on pant legs. You decide to pull it out and deal with it. Often you have formed other connections with this image as you've gone about daily life's doings. Submerged below your consciousness threshold, this image has been doing it's work and idea presents itself almost fully formed.

That is what happened with this little study. I found the cloud image in an advertisement in a magazine and cut it out. Wasn't sure what I wanted to do with it, and interleaved it in my journal pages. One day on a particularly glorious Spring day the cloud formations caught my attention and I mused on them. It occurred to me that on such a day is when ,everywhere in the world people like to sit and share conversation and pleasure in the day. I wrote down my thought in simple form in my journal. It occurred to me that I had a picture of clouds that might be appropriate to accompany the sentiment. I incorporated a Hungarian translation to suggest universality.

Materials - colour xerox enlargement of a 2" by 4" advertisement fragment. Text - liquid white-out and felt pen.

Opportunity for observation...

Going about one's daily business provides many opprtunities for looking and seeing. Every situation encountered yields possible images. While the camera is a useful tool to record a situation it does not allow for immediacy, for the recording of an observed scenario, and the photos often disappoint expectations. What is it about the situation directly witnessed that makes for compelling note-taking?

A friend had taken me along to a local nursery to help her choose shrub plantings for a section of her back yard. She was the one to do the hard thinking and decision-making, leaving me alone to look about, to case out the views in the nursery. The woman in this sketch made a good model. She stood in place for 5 minutes, casting about for companion plants for those she had already selectd to buy, and which she had placed on the rolling nursery cart. I made goood use of the 5 minutes and jotted down this observation. What to include, what to leave out? I had to make the decision and go for broke. This is the drawing that resulted.

Later as my friend walked about the nursery making her selection, this placement of specimes caught my eye. I stopped and drew for another 5 minutes.

Opportunity for drawing from observation exists at every part of the waking day. The practice of drawing in this manner allows for relaxation, for no end agenda in mind. The process of looking and seeing is the end in itself. A good way to learn to draw, to appreciate the riches and bounty available to all.

Who knows how further work in the studio may make use of such observed facts. Poets use words, with all their meaning combined to yield communication about thoughts and feelings ocurring to them. Visual artists stock-in-trade is image, the making of a mark. a visual artist needs to keep a vocabulary, constantly add to it, a visual vocabulary. Then making compositions with meaning becomes a definite possibility.. Looking becomes seeing becomes feeling becomes thinking.

The Draped Figure

Making a convincing drawing of a draped human figure pre-supposes an understanding of how the forms are disported under clothing. Drapery follows form; the closer fit the clothing the more clearly the anatomy is shown in the final drawing. Where the clothing has loose or ample fit, the cloth adds bulk to the anatomy, it balloons and folds with the bending of limbs, and the material's weight influences the character of the drawn cloth.

In the case of this drawing, on 9 by 12 inch sketchbook page, 4B pencil, the model is pictured wearing Karate uniform. The cotton of this uniform was a heavy weave which made stiff forms as the body within folded into different poses. A ten minute drawing, this one did not allow time for noting any more than the major movements of the form of the clothed figure and the clothing, which seemed easier to note using a loose contour method of drawing. I consider this type of drawing a form of draftsman calisthenics. decisions of what to include or exclude by way of detail are made on the spot, for good or ill, and one simply has to accept the consequent drawing that results. I found the appearance of the figure, swathed in the stiff folds of uniform quite fascinating, and once my attention was caught on this aspect I drew with energy and enthusiasm.