It's live drawing day. My favorite of the week. Rode my bike a couple blocks down to Queen Street East, portfolio bag strapped across my shoulder carrying a new drawing paper pad and new drawing medium.
I picked a thinner paper and a brown colored lead called Sanguine for drawing. I was not too happy with the graphite I had used previously so I decided to try out a different medium. Modeling for us today was Lauren.
Warming up with a handful of 1 and 2 minute poses. These are super fast drawings on newsprint paper. No time for detail or accuracy.
The pose went up to 10 minutes. Lauren sitting on a towel. Higher quality paper used.
Lauren sitting at the edge of the chair. This was a 15 minute pose. I got carried away with getting the fingers right, time ran out and I realized I forgot the feet.
This was the most difficult pose to draw. It had many fore-shortening body parts that could easily make the body look odd. It also positioned at an unusual angle, and much details to capture in such short amount of time.
This was the 20 minute final pose. Lauren standing with one knee kneeling on the chair.
At the end of the drawing session, I pulled this image out of the stack and asked Lauren to sign it. I love it when the model sign the work. It makes the work feel “colaborated” by both subject and artist, making it more personal, to me.
Summary
1. I like this Sanguine medium much better. Its brown color lends warmth to the drawings and compliments the figure better than the grayish graphite. I will stick to this.
2. These drawings seem to be better than the ones from previous weeks. I wonder if it was the model or the new medium that had helped. Two small things I noticed: I got a bit better at hand and feet—a usual dredge of mine. I also got the facial features to slightly resemble the model's, which was surreal for me, for I always got the face to look like anything but the subject's. I had to resort to the laborious grid method for that in the past. While I was in Melbourne, I often passed street portrait artists and admired them. I always believed that was the one skill I don't have. Now I begin to think I might be wrong.
Lauren was a pleasure to work with. The pencil loved her. Sitting still for fifteen minutes wasn't easy. I'm grateful for her hard work.
B.Ng — May 17, 2016