First Week Reflection

Already I've dove headfirst back into the world of drawing.  This time, however, I get to focus on life, mostly my shell and our model we had last Thursday.  It's a very different feel from my other classes, where I had developed skills in drawing in a very painterly way, pushing out large shapes with the fat end of my charcoal, and then pulling it in using the eraser as a drawing tool.  Instead here I find myself not even thinking about an eraser, instead I get to make lines exclusively with the charcoal sharpened to a fine point.  I can use some elements from my hatched figure drawings I enjoy doing in my sketchbook, but here I have to focus more on the lines and their diversity.  Learning just when to make a line quickly, or calculated, thin or fat, pale or bold--this is part of what I've been digesting in the first week drawing blind or continuous contour drawings of my shell.

Drawing with the model when differently than I had expected.  In my mind, I had thought that I would be rushing to create something rough, but representational.  I had anticipated creating a series of drawings that depicted half investigated necks, shoulders, backs, hips, etc.  Instead I had to accept that every drawing, whether 30 minutes or 30 seconds in duration, had to capture the entire form from head to toe.  It was then a matter of finding lines that seemed important, and scrawling them across the page until I had a gestural stick figure that may or may not have accurately captured the contour of the model's hip or shoulder or whatever seemed dominant.  Honestly, my hardest task was to draw the model in front of me, and not simply construct a figure out of what I already know.  Often times I would find that my drawings looked a little too masculine.  This was because I was tending to pull lines out of my head, preconceptions based more on my own body than the model's.  Like with the blind contour drawings we did with the shells earlier, I had to try to really look at the model, and hope that my hand could mimic the curves accurately.