Reclining Female

Last week was my first figure drawing session since mid-December. I was dreading the return to the art horse after being away so long. Maybe my low expectations gave me some added comfort, because I felt surprisingly relaxed throughout the short poses. I then painted this watercolor sketch of the reclining model —no face, which makes things considerably easier.

I'm thinking of going back into it. Not sure.

Latest Watercolor Exercises

These two watercolor sketches are from the first two weeks of the fall session at Manifest. I'm pretty happy with the progress overall.

I've been trying to work in a bolder looser fashion. I'm also trying to forfeit a lot of control to the medium itself, which parodoxically gives the illusion of control in the final result.

These imperfect reproductions were taken with a point and shoot camera. I'll try to get scanned versions later —tiling them takes hours.

Reclining Female

More practice with watercolor figures. I'm trying to allow the drawing underneath to play a larger role in the final piece.

I prefer the detail of the upper body, but here's the full piece below anyway:

Reclining Figure in Watercolor

I took watercolors to my figure-drawing session last Tuesday, which took a bit of nerve. Although I'm not entirely satisfied with the work, I'm posting it anyway —I'm determined to gain some proficiency at this, and chronicling my successes and failures will hopefully push me a bit harder. I'm pretty happy with the head and lower torso, even though I wish I had laid in the color with less scrubbing. The model's shoulder isn't reading quite right, partly because I added a thin dark shadow on the cloth where it rises and overlaps the figure. I also struggled with the light on the breasts and lower ribcage, so the upper torso isn't reading the way i'd like it to.

I'll try again this week, and make some changes to my setup, so I can make better use of my time and materials.

Watercolor

Three weeks ago I decided to switch media. Not because I was bored with pastel —quite the opposite, as I feel I've barely begun to mine their potential. For years I've been meaning to improve my skill in using watercolor —forcing myself to paint the figure in this challenging medium should help a lot. After two lackluster attempts, I decided to move to a larger sheet of paper and put in lighter washes relying a bit more on my graphite linework. This is the result.



The colors got lighter as they dried (something I'm going to have to get used to.) So I may have to revisit this, giving more attention to the modeling of the hands and softening the bare pate. Darkening the background should help as well.

Reclining Figure

This is another piece created during the fall sessions at Manifest. Just about an hour and a half pose.



It's always a challenge, but I like foreshortened subjects. I like seeing long limbs transformed into compact shapes not usually associated with the human figure.