Volume

As you can probably tell from the drawing below, I am still struggling with faces, feet and hands.

                                                                                                     Seated Nude

                                                                                                     Charcoal On Paper

This was a 20 minute drawing done in Wednesday night's figure drawing class. The class is four hours long. We begin with one minute drawings, really just long enough to get a gesture of the pose. Having to rough in a gesture that quickly is great because it gets your brain out of the way. You don't think about it because there is no time to think, no time to second guess. There is barely enough time draw.

After the one minute gestures we move on to two minutes, then five, ten, and twenty minutes. As you increase the amount of time the amount of detail increases, as does (hopefully) the accuracy of your rendering. The other thing that increases your accuracy? Volume. Doing a shit ton of drawings.

In my Tuesday evening painting class, the instructor asked me if I was having any particular issues while working on my piece. I mentioned that sometimes I had problems with paint consistency, having either too much or too little solvent on my brush, making the paint either too thick to spread evenly, or too thin to cover adequately. He said there was no magical formula, that you just had to learn to feel it by doing it. Volume. Doing a shit ton of paintings.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. 

So the goal for myself is three drawings and one painting, outside of class, per week. I will try to show some of that here.

Peace in yer crease.