Tonight was the first time I took my set of 12 Staedtler Mars Lumograph graphite pencils to an open studio session at The Plastic Club in Philadelphia. I normally only use the pencil set at my Intro to Pencil Drawing class at Studio incamminati, but I felt it was time to try and apply what I’m learning in the class to a different scenario and environment. Up until tonight, I had only used the Bargue techniques in class, copying other drawings or working from cast models, so applying the method to a live model was a bit of a challenge.
The pose in this drawing was a 1-hour pose, broken up into three 20-minute sessions. In class, we have at least 2 to 3 hours to work on drawing a part of the body, from a picture or cast that doesn’t move. My David’s Eye drawing took three weeks, or at least 6 hours, to complete. So, trying to complete an entire figure, that was in a slightly different position after every break, in only an hour, was a hopeless goal. However, using the time to practice applying these techniques – setting the width, abstracting the figure, using only lines to block-in the figure and shadow shapes, etc. – was a fantastic exercise.
The drawing is obviously nowhere near completion, but I was pleasantly surprised that, in an hour’s time, I was able to adequately draw a proportionately sound figure. You can see that many of the lines are still straight and angular, but my primary goal wasn’t so much to fine-tune the details as it was to get the proportions and gesture correct. I feel the biggest criticism I would receive from my teacher, if she was there, is that I jumped into shading way too soon. A better exercise would probably have been to make only a line drawing, indicating all the form and cast shadows with only straight lines and shapes. Before shading, I would have to create a value scale and start only shading my dark shadow value before moving on to any other values. I obviously got ahead of myself because I was too excited about getting something that looked a little more complete.
It was reassuring to see the fruits of what I’ve been learning in class. All too often, classroom learning and techniques can feel isolating and seem impractical in “real world” scenarios. But, as a first attempt to apply this classroom learning, I am very happy to see how much it has changed my approach for the better.
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