Today I revisited the Rodin Museum here in Philadelphia to sketch from his sculptures once again. As I mentioned in my post on October 13, 2018, the museum allows visitors once per month to come and sketch for 2 hours. They provide an instructor, who gives a brief demonstration and a few suggestions, then you can sit or stand anywhere you’d like to sketch any of the sculptures. One of the suggestions the the instructor gave was to use your time wisely; try to sketch as many works as possible, just concentrating on gesture. I apparently wasn’t listening.
The first piece I tried to sketch was the beautiful work titled The Kiss, one of Rodin’s most famous sculptures. I started with just doing a rough sketch of the gesture, which came out surprisingly well, so I decided to keep at it and add more detail. While I wasn’t incredibly precise with the proportions, particularly of the man, I was pleased with the overall drawing. I do think I’m getting better at drawing “sock hands” and “sock feet” (the large shape indications for them with out details). But, before I knew it, an hour had passed, and I had only sketched one thing.
I moved on to a smaller statue, about 18” tall, called Meditation. As you can see in the photo, it’s an excellent subject to study gesture, with reverse S-curve of the entire body and her outstretched arm. Again, I was happy with my initial sketch, so I continued, adding form shadows, facial details, and then – the left hand. Just by virtue of the darker lines around that hand, it’s evident I spent most of my time there. And although I do believe I’m understanding the structure of the hand a little better, it was an incredibly difficult hand to draw, and took way too much time to render.
I need to take advantage of the opportunity here to practice the skills on which I should be concentrating at this level – gesture and drawing. Luckily, there will be more opportunities, and this was fun nonetheless.
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