Month: December 2022
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Speed drill: Ellie L
A timed series of figure studies of the Love Life Drawing model Ellie L, 2 minutes per pose. No underdrawing. What was I thinking? At 2 minutes, I should have been doing gestures! Well, you live and learn.
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15 minute figures
Another in the set of lost images. These figures are from a live Love Life Drawing session, 15 minutes for the set. I clearly did no kind of underdrawing here, and tried to build the figures from outline shapes. That’s not the way to go!
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Co-drawing session, Nov ’22
On a live call with Kenzo and other study group members from the Love Life Drawing forum, we did a session of timed figure studies. The numbers are numbers of seconds per pose. I don’t feel like I do a great job of these speed drawings still, and generally don’t like the results. The woman…
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Reclining nude figure study
This is another older item that I neglected to post here. On the Love Life Drawing forums, someone posted their rendition of this figure. I was taken by the pose and wanted to do my version of it. I was still in the mode of tracing simplified shapes over the reference (at the top, in…
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Lilith revisited
This is another painting of Lilith, from the Love Life Drawing reference series. I did this several weeks ago and apparently just never uploaded it here. At the time I was pretty frustrated by it because I’d set out to make a simplified shapes painting and wound up doing too much detail. Once again, trying…
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Stick figures with volume
Lesson 6 in the Love Life Drawing beginner course adds the rib cages and a simple pelvis volume to the stick figures of lesson 4. As before, the exercise asks you to draw a freehand stick figure (these are in brown) near a reference picture, then “trace” another directly on the reference (in green). When…
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Intrigued succubus
When I completed the 100 rib cage lesson, I knew I needed to take a break from instruction and just do something fun. I did a bunch of sketches, but this one jumped out at me as something I needed to polish up and complete. This is a painting of Aftyn Rose roleplaying as one…
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Helena Bonham Carter
Portrait of Helena Bonham Carter, in a still from 1985’s A Room With a View. I was going a little crazy drawing rib cage after rib cage and needed a break. This was a friend’s suggestion, and it made for a very nice diversion. My sketches have progressed to a point where they generally work…
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Torso pivots
I mentioned in my stick figure series post two of the poses foiled me, so I set them aside to do more detailed studies. Here they are. The original problem, something many beginner artists experience, is a tendency to straighten out the human torso. I think it’s an extension of the symbolic thinking trap described…
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Skater
When doing my stick figure training series, I did a set of skateboarders. One of the references really jumped out at me as a dynamic pose, and I decided I wanted to paint it. I’m trying to reduce detail, focus on simpler shapes, along with the usual goals of good representation, improving at the tools,…
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Kenzo
I had a day with hours and hours of drawing for lessons, and I felt the need to blow off some steam. I drew a quick portrait of the Love Life Drawing instructor, Kenzo Fry. It’s not a bad likeness, although it does look a little distorted. If I wanted to spend more time on…
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Study group – gesture 4
Kind of a summary week in the last Love Life Drawing study group exercise for gesture month. This series of drawings is more relaxed than any of my previous gesture drawings, which is pleasing. I allowed myself a cleanup pass on the line work, but left the sketch layer visible, in order to not “hide…
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Sweet and messy maid
A painting of Aftyn Rose being an outrageously sexy maid. I’ve amped up the sexiness a little bit in this rendition as a Christmas present to myself. So, um, yes. Moving along. I have been doing some monochrome work with the Sinix brush set. While the wide dry brush has unlocked something in me for…
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Flag bearer
This was another attempt at a loose painting style, depicting Arthur draping himself in a big, red robe. The goal here is to simplify the figure into larger value shapes, using the minimum of marks to communicate the pose and biological features you want to draw attention to. This one is a lot closer than…
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I drew 101 rib cages… and boy are my arms tired
Lesson 5 of the Love Life Drawing beginning figure drawing course asks us to drill on drawing a 3D rib cage volume a hundred times. “Until you’re kind of sick of it, frankly,” Kenzo says. And I am sick of it. I spent a week drawing all these. On occasion I got cross-eyed enough I…
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Study group – gesture 3
The Love Life Drawing study group exercise this week was to make gesture drawings of those same 6 figures we’ve been doing this month with a finite number of marks. The goal is to describe the pose with 12-15 CSI strokes. CSI means the shape each mark should be a C-curve, an S-curve, or a…
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Fall in the Midwest
With the end of daylight saving time, my evening walks with Riley are now in sunset. There’s something special about the quality of light at that time, the fiery reds and oranges and yellows trending up into the slate blues through a transition that’s difficult for the eyes to track. I love it, and fill…
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Study group – gesture 2
This week in the study group, we were to elaborate on the gestures from last week by adding in some secondary information about the pose from the arm/shoulder areas. Kenzo’s description of the intent seemed clear enough, but when I got into execution, I felt like I lost that focus on secondary cues. Like, maybe…
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Website maintenance
I’ve done quite a lot of maintenance on the site here over the last couple weeks. I’ve got a new caching layer active, which has cut the response time substantially. I juggled a bunch of plugins, including adding a new gallery plugin that will let me make some nice pages showing off sets of images.…
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Stick figures
Lesson 4 of the Love Life Drawing beginner life drawing course is to draw stick figures. I drew lots of stick figures. The set above, my last for this lesson, represents a pretty good success, but let’s come back to that one in a moment. At first I was drawing stick figures on top of…
