Sketch of Rodin’s sculpture, The Thinker
Throughout my 40’s, as I explored more deeply the art of photography and creating engaging, meaningful images, I began to further appreciate and be inspired by the art of drawing and painting. It takes skill and practice to create beautiful and artistic photographs, but the skill and ability to take raw materials, like graphite, charcoal, and paint, then manipulate them on a blank canvas or piece of paper to created expressive portraits with light, shadow, depth, form, and dimension, absolutely fascinated me. As much as I still loved photography, I felt the need to push myself further, visually, and truly learn the art of seeing. Drawing became the means for that exploration.
Between August of 2016 and September of 2018, I experimented with materials, tried self-teaching methods, and occasionally attended figure drawing open-studios. I learned a great deal, and made some measurable progress, but without any real formal training, I knew I would soon hit a plateau not knowing how to truly apply all of these scattered raw skills I was learning. So, in October of 2018, immediately relocating back to Philadelphia from Nashville, TN, I decided to focus my creative energy and pursuit to truly learning to draw and to seriously set out on the path to becoming an artist, visually.
With so many great schools, clubs, and other resources in Philly, I resigned to trying as many as possible. Drawing the human figure was the most challenging thing for me to draw, so I gravitated to that as my main subject, and looked primarily for opportunities to draw from life with a live model. The drawings in this post are from my first drawing event at the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia at their Second Saturday Sketch. Drawing from such beautifully realistic sculptures as these is the next best thing to drawing from a live model.
Sketch of Rodin’s sculpture, I Am Beautiful
My goal with these sketches was to capture the gesture as closely as possible. Only using a 2B graphite pencil, I was somewhat pleased with the overall gesture of these two drawings, despite the obvious problems with proportion, particularly in the sketch of I Am Beautiful.
My goal with this blog is to document my work, creating a record of my progress. I plan to post not only the successes, but the failures as well, so I can refer to them as reminders about what I still need to improve. My thanks to Dave Krevolin for the help and guidance at this session, particularly in forcing me to stay away from details and concentrate on gesture. And for the valuable lesson on rhythms – the overlapping lines forming the musculature in the arms and body.
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