After an April break, I've returned in may for the monthly life drawing with Jake Spicer. The class this time was around gesture, and how do we show gesture in both quick croquis and longer poses. Here is Jake's wonderful line work as he was walking us through the concept:
I've tried to keep the idea of the form in action as I warmed up.
We were encouraged to use charcoal, and after struggling with my initial too pale, too dainty and light strokes with graphite, I've obliged with the luxurious lines of charcoal.
Ideally, I would do croquis with ink, but wet medium isn't for every class space out there, and this one is held inside the Cass Art store. We've done quick successions of short 2' poses, and I've concentrated on just back into the swing of things after my April break.
In the second part of the class, Jake encouraged us to not look too much into the model's pose itself, but rather start feeling the figure and its rhythm. To do that, we were to first look without drawing, and jot down a word that this pose reminds us of. To get the gesture down, we would employ both our visual and linguistic senses.
I really loved this idea and had no problem employing my imagination to see the model as an Aquarius, Venus, dancer, you name it.
This might come in handy when a gesture is undecided and i can't seem to start on a pose in the future.
I'm happy to have come back to my big sketchbook and return to drawing often.The drawings are quite stiff, but I will experiment with more materials in the future. Perhaps a brush pen would replace my wish for inky, messy croquis?
I've took note on some of the artists we were encouraged to research on this topic, notably Nicolaides and Alam McGowan.
