Casey Learns to Draw

What is this page? If you came to this page intentionally, then you already know what it is. You are probably Checker, Harry, Steve, or Joe, my friends who are real artists, and you are here because I am continually pestering you to come and look at my drawings so you can tell me how to fix what I'm doing wrong. This is the "it takes a whole village to raise a child" paradigm in action, whereby "village" I mean "artist colony", and by "child" I mean "programmer".

If you are anybody besides these unfortunate folks, you are probably wondering why a programmer's home-page has a bunch of drawings on it. Well, the answer is because I want to understand what people see when they see a human body, what makes one person look different from another, what makes people look interesting, dangerous, cute, bizarre, humorous, etc. I would like to know what your mind uses to read facial expressions, muscle tension, and balance.

This is because my primary area of research and development over the past five years has been real-time 3D character animation systems programming, and I have come to think that it will be hard to accomplish the next round of advances in that area without a much more artistic knowledge of the problem. This is because real-time animation involves generating animation on the fly, where no artist is able to sit down and hand-create what is going to happen. The animation code must "do the right thing" in generating the movement, the muscle deformation, and the physics. I don't see any real way to develop this kind of system if I don't have a deep understanding of the artistic principles at work in the first place.

So, I asked Checker what to do to educate myself, since he is a certified Parsons drop-out. He said, "Take a figure drawing class, all charcoal and newsprint. No other materials." I looked for a while, and finally found a Seattle-area class that fit that exact description at the Seattle Academy of Fine Art. So I took it. After 4 weeks, I decided I hated the class, but loved open studio, so I dropped out of the class and will just be doing open studio from now on. This was my initial idea (just doing open studio), but Checker insisted I should take a class, and he would probably have been right if the class were better. Maybe I will try again if I can find a better class, but for now I am quite happy with open studio, and if Harry keeps coming on Sundays, then I'll get plenty of great instruction that way anyways.

What is on this page? This page contains all the drawings I have done since the start of the class. Literally. Every single thing, from two-minute gesture drawings up. I have organized the page in descending chronological order, such that the most recent class or studio is first, and the very first class is all the way at the bottom. This is so when I bug the artist contingent to come and help out, they don't have to scroll to the bottom to see where I'm at :)

Well, I feel like I'm back in the swing of things now. This was a really tough angle on a reclining pose, and actually, I feel like it went really well. I'm not terribly happy with the drawing, but really, it kind of looks like what it looked like - I mean, it just wasn't really a very interesting pose to draw. But it came out OK, and I felt like I was in control of the drawing the entire time (which is unusual for me).

The hardest part of the drawing, as with most faces, was the lips, primarily because they really are more of a tonal variation than a shading variation (which is obviously not directly representable when you are only dealing with a shading medium, ie. single color charcoal). It was aggravated by the fact that at such a weird angle, and with gravity pulling everything in a different directio than normal, the shape of the mouth was really pretty weird. I didn't draw it quite right still, but I think I need to gain another 1500 experience points before I can really do a good mouth in charcoal with a situation like that. Or, maybe I'll just cheat and put on some +5 gloves of dexterity :) OK, enough RPGness for now.

Well, today was the first day back at studio since the summer semester at SAFA ended (why they break studio in sync with the semesters I have no idea, since as far as I can tell, none of the people who go to the weekend/night studios take classes there...) Anyhow, things went superbly. I could feel that I was pretty rusty, so I did three warm-up quickies first before diving into a full drawing, and at first I thought the full drawing was going to come out crappy, but I dug in and refused to let it go, and it ended up coming out quite nice.

The model was really cool looking - she was vaguely asian with really neat stern features and a crew-cut like hairdo. Because I spent so much time warming up, I only had about an hour and a half for the drawing, so I only got to finish the face and hair. The ear and the neck I threw on at the last minute (as with the drapery), and so unfortunately, they suck. I really wish I had another hour, or even half hour, because I think this drawing would've been my very best one ever if I'd had the time. As it is, it's still one of the better ones, for sure.

The other hillarious thing about today's studio is that the crappy drawing instructor who tought the class that I dropped out of was there practicing as well. So, of course, I wanted to know if she actually drew well. Man, the answer to that question is a resounding "no". She can't draw her way out of paper bag man! There's a fundamental line you have to cross, after being a beginner, that gets you into "intermediate" or whatever you want to call what I am now - and that line is that your drawing starts looking like _the_ person, and not _a_ person. She's still in the _a_ person category, because from the drawing she did, you'd swear she was looking at a different model :) Anyway, more proof that if you're going to bother taking a drawing class, you really need to do your research first and find a teacher who draws really well.

So, today reminds me of something I've been meaning to talk about for a while, which is that I don't buy the whole "drawing on the right side of the brain thing", or whatever the hell it is that they say about disconnecting the semantic understanding while you draw. I don't find that to be the case at all. For me, the more I semantically understand what I'm seeing, the better i can draw it.

Today's case in point: models lying down. I've only done this two or three times. This time I didn't do so well, and it was largely because I tried drawing mostly straight-on (ie., without turning my head 90 degrees so I could see the face rightside-up from my perspective). The previous time, I drew mostly that way (with my head tilted), and it came out much better.

So this leads me to believe that, at least for me, I need to understand what I'm seeing, not just pretend it's an arbitrary collection of lines and blobs and stuff. I just don't buy that. Because when I'm look at the model and I'm like, yeah, OK, the backlight is hitting the rim of her nose and I'm getting an oily reflection off that part that connects the nose to the cheek, and the eyes are reflecting the window, etc., etc., that's when I really do good drawings, because I get what's going on. When I just try to disconnect and draw abstractly, that's when things come out looking like shit.

Today was short poses, and at this point I'm really just not interested in short poses, because I'm still on a faces kick and you can't do faces in twenty minutes... at least not at the level of detail that I usually do.

The model was pretty darn ugly today, so, well, it's not just me drawing weird. I mean, part of it is that, because I only had such a short time to draw it, but the other part of it is that even a long pose portrait of an ugly person looks ugly. Some people are interesting-ugly, and others are just ugly, and in this case it was the latter.

Today was bizarre. First of all, there was some kind of substitute monitor for the studio, and she was like, totally confused. I had to show her how to use the book sign-in and stuff, and then she spent like six years futzing with the lighting and everyone was complaining about everything. It sucked.

BUT, the model had a really bizarre face and I was almost at right angles with her view direction, so I had a great time drawing. I did one drawing for the entire time, and I'm really pleased with the way it came out. It's very accurate. I'm going to put it under the title with the other thumbnails...

Oh yeah - and that thing in her nose? I think it's a stud or something. I honestly couldn't tell what it was even from as close as I was, so I just drew what it looked like as best I could. I think it must've been a very small highly reflective jewel mounted on a squarish stud... or something.

Once again, not a very interesting model. And not a very good drawing either. I seem to have the most trouble with drawing when I'm in the front of the ring, which is where I was today. The problem seems to be that because the right is kind of horseshoe-shaped, the ends of the ring are closer to the model then the top of the ring, and so when I'm at the top, I'm further away, and I can't see very well. So the drawings are kind of undetailed.

That said, it was a short-pose studio, so no drawing could take longer than 25 minutes. So some came out OK considering that restriction. The final drawing I just gave up on 'cause I was bored, and I just went home. I'd already drawn basically the same thing two drawings prior, and I just wasn't super-interested in doing it again.

Well, not a lot to say today. The model was not terribly interesting. The drawing came out looking pretty much like what the view from my easel was, but it just wasn't very interesting. I spent some time playing with smudging things around, and using my kneadable eraser to lighten things where necessary.

I like the way the shading came out today, because it was very solid, and it gives a good feel to the different parts of the face. It makes everything look like a physical thing, instead of a drawing, kind of - if you know what I mean. I'm not really making a lot of sense here but you get the idea.

Anyhow, next week I won't be able to go to open studio, because I'll be at home visiting my parents. And that is the last open studio session in this series - so hopefully the new series will start soon, since I'm just getting back into the swing of things here.

Today was somewhat disappointing, because I feel like I still need a few more studios to really get back into shape, but today's model was really beautiful. She's much better looking than I am good with Conté. I tried to do a decent job, but really, I know I need more sessions with Conté, and really I need to get a good Conté-compatible pencil, for this kind of thing.

That said, I still like the way the reclining post came out - this was a one hour pose, and I think I handled the tricky fleshtoning reasonably well given that I still don't totally have my head around the Conté behavior yet. What I've basically been doing is drawing with the Conté like I draw with the charcoal, and then I smudge it with my finger, and then I rub it around with a shamois. I can't do any fine detail this way - that's why everything always looks so blurry, compared to my charcoal pencil drawings, which look extremely sharp.

So really, what I'd like to do is find a nice pencil that works with the Conté (the charcoal pencil comes out obviously gray if you try to use it with the Conté, which is overpoweringly black). I really like the strength of the Conté and the BFK paper, but the sticks are just too blunt to do the detail work that I like to do.

Well then. It turns out that they DID re-start the Open Studios that I love so much, but just neglected to ever actually POST it on their web page. Damn. Well, I am able to catch the tail for sessions, so I started today - it's Sundays at noon, which is an easy time for me to make.

It was easy enough to get back into the swing of things - but on the whole, I could tell I was a little rusty. I did a few rough sketches and then a few 25-minute jobs, and then called it quits for the day. Hopefully I will be back up to speed quickly.

Today was an interesting event at SAFA called the "drawing jam", which is basically just a giant set of open studios all going on at the same time. There were short poses, long poses, costumed poses, and so on. It was a twelve-hour event, and I went for the four hours while Cara was at work.

Overall I wasn't very into it for some reason - so the drawings are less than interesting. However, I did really like this one pose where this girl was lying down on a pillow, the drawing of which you can see in the lower corner of the image to the left. It was really neat because her mouth was just barely open and I wanted to see if I could get it to look like that in the drawing. I think it came out pretty well, but that's the only drawing from this set that I'm all that fond of. It only took about forty minutes or so, which is pretty good time for me.

I have to find another open studio. God damn this one sucks. The lighting is so ass, and the poses - oh my word. Half the time I can barely see the model, despite being five feet away, because there are so many easels and stools packed in there and the model picks a pose like "curled up in a ball with head hung low, facing towards the wall". Which is a wonderful pose to draw, especially when you're working on faces.

Anyhow, the only thing interesting about this session was the dog. I didn't really have enough time to draw him, but it was fun while it lasted. Enough said.

Well, they closed my old studios - last week was the last one. So I had nowhere to draw. Fortunately, the model from last week was a guy named Rick Giombetti who prints a small modeling newsletter called The Model Employee. He hooked me up with the info, and I was able to find some new leads for open studios that happen around town and so forth.

The first studio I was able to find was at Daniel Smith in Bellevue. It's a small arts and crafts place with a cramped room in the back for drawing. The easels feel like they're built for midgets, and don't go up even remotely high enough for me... they leave the flourescent lights on while you're drawing (which is ass), and they don't do any poses longer than 25 minutes. So, to say the least, this is a major step down from SAFA, but one takes what one can get.

I am on a face kick recently (as you could see starting with last week's studio), so after the warm-up gestures I did all face close-ups. The first two are tens, the next two are fifteens, and the final one is a twenty five. I was pretty happy with how they came out. I felt nice and loose with the BFK and Conté. This is the first time I've really taken them for a spin with short poses. They work great, just like they do for hour poses. Big two thumbs up! I'm going to have to get a stack of this stuff... I bought a whole box of Conté at the U.W. Bookstore when I went with Harry, so I'm not in danger of running out of that stuff for months, but I have very little BFK on reserve. I wonder if you can buy that in bulk too...

Today was a sad studio, because there was nobody there. It was me, the monitor, the model, and one other person. That's it. Not a very energetic studio.

We did six warm-up gestures at the start of the studio, and I noticed that I'm having less and less trouble now with proportion, regardless of whether I'm actually paying attention or not. Which I'm very happy about. I don't seem to make any gross errors in the sizes of stuff much anymore, and that's a good thing.

I didn't do any pencil-work today, and I've found that in general I can't really do much detail work with the Conté. It's just too hard to control for me. I can only really do big stuff with it. I'd like to maybe get a more dense compressed charcoal pencil at some point.

The most interesting thing I did today is the big face to the left, which was me just focusing on one part of the model and drawing that instead of drawing the whole pose. I did this as an experiment, just to see how it would come out. I found that the hardest part for me was that I just couldn't see very well at all. It was very difficult for me to make things out. But overall I'm fairly happy with how it came out, just as an experiment - but next time I will concentrate on it more, because this time around I was fairly sloppy with where everything went, and it comes out all discombobulated as a result.

Today I tried doing a real drawing with the Conté, BFK, and the old compressed charcoal pencils. The model was a model I'd drawn before - see 09/25/2002. The BFK paper really makes it easy to move stuff around, so I did a lot of futzing so that things would come out to my satisfaction. The upside to this is that I really like the way the head and upper body came out. The downside is that I did get a chance to finish the rest of the drawing :) But hey, I never seem to be able to wrap things up in 3 hours, I think I am a 6 hour person for the most part.

One thing that I noticed while drawing with the compressed charcoals, now the I have the BFK paper, is that contrast really makes a huge difference in how the drawing looks. The darker the darkers and lighter the lights, the more the drawing really pops out at you. It's pretty groovy.

I also find that the BFK paper is much more relaxing to work with, because you can always erase stuff on it, so you never have to be too worried about your marks. You can just put things where you think you want them, and then change your mind later, which is exactly what Harry said you want. And now I see how that's possible - because with newsprint, let me just tell ya, it ain't easy to move stuff around.

Well. The reason this studio wasn't posted until the following Sunday was because I, being a dumbass, left my drawing pad at the studio! That made it rather difficult to photograph the drawings and post them, as you might imaging. ANYHOW...

This was a very interesting studio, because I went with Harry, who forgot all his art supplies. So, we stopped at the U.W. bookstore to buy art supplies, and he encouraged me to get some BFK paper to try (since I hadn't tried good paper yet - just newsprint). I also bought Conté compressed charcoal sticks, which are much (much, much) harder than the soft vine charcoal I had been using previously.

Let me just say, oh my word, this stuff is good stuff. It is amazingly fun to draw with this stuff. You can really draw and redraw and move stuff around all you want, and you can play with the angle of the stick and stuff, and it's just really great. I didn't really do any good drawings with it, I just played around to get the feel. To the left is one I did where I only used the edge of the stick - it was really difficult, but fun.

Well, today was unfortunately a continuation of the pose from 11/02/2002... which is to say it was a really boring model in a really boring pose. I was in the corner where I usually am, and some dude showed up late and that was his spot from the previous session, and he wanted to continue his shitty drawing, so I moved further over (hence the first drawing was aborted). So I started again, but I didn't have enough time to finish before the break, and I was grumpy, and so on.

Next try. I got bored and started drawing the rest of the room, which was going OK until one of the two people in my view decided to leave during the break. So there goes that idea.

I drew the model from my point of view for the next session, just to do a fun quick drawing. It came out OK I guess, but I wasn't really all that jazzed about doing it anyway because the rest of the studio had been so ridiculous.

So I decided to do something that I'd wanted to do for a while, which is to pretend that the model was made of paper and I could cut it apart and unfold it onto the page however I so chose. It was a lot of fun - it was a quick proof of concept but it came out cool enough that I'd like to try doing it again when I'm freer to move around the room (ie., set up an easel in multiple positions so I don't have to extrapolate what the unwrapped pieces will look like).

Today's Open Studio was a lot of fun. The model was an old lady, which was really cool because there were a bunch of cool skin and shape features that you don't get with the young models. She also brought some neat drapery with her for the single, long seated pose.

I only did two drawings - the first was a quick warm-up sketch, and the second was a full two-hour sketch of the seated pose. I did not have time to finish the sketch (it seems like four hours would be my magic time limit for finishing a full page drawing!), but you can still see some of the block-out in the areas that I left unfinished.

I think the drawing came out pretty well. It looks a lot like the model actually looked, especially in the face, and I think the half-and-half coloring is kind of nice too. This is something Harry and Checker were both getting on me about, namely that I should put in the background where there is light and dark and so on, because that's part of what defines the shapes in the foreground. Which is obviously true, but you don't always think of it unless you've been told to do so.

Today was a unique Open Studio because Checker came up from Oakland (California) to visit, and made sure he got an early flight so he could come to studio with me - yay!

So, this was a lesson studio :) I started off by doing a qiuck block-in, and then I started on the second drawing, only to find that Checker had come around and decided to watch me draw. Shortly after that, he began insisting that I draw bigger strokes, and that I make them a lot darker - I think he feels like I am pussying around on the page.

One of the big things he said was "decide" - as in you have to decide where to put some stuff, and make a distinct, dark mark and say "this goes here". I had been very hesitant to do this, because Harry had previously (correctly) pointed out that you want your entire drawing to be fluid, so that no mark is permanent. But Checker was also right about this - it really does help a lot. How can both these things be true? Well, it seems like the right thing is that you make dark marks, and you fit things into place, but as soon as something isn't working out, you just erase and move. So the key is, don't make things light and unclear just because you know you'll probably move them later - make them dark so you know what they mean, and then just erase them when you need to move them. I find this is actually really key...

Anyhow, since Checker borrowed my art stuff, I have all his drawings now! So they're all posted to the left. He started out by warming up with some gestures, but then he did something hillarious: instead of drawing the model, he drew one of the other guys who was drawing, because he didn't think the model was very interesting! I got quite a kick out of that.

Harry came to studio again today, and encouraged me to try some different ways of drawing as practice, so I did. There are 3 short drawings (ten-minutes-or-less), and then five twenty-minutes-or-less. Two of them were practicing drawing nothing but shadow and/or background areas, and ignoring countours completely.

I was particularly happy with the way the final drawing came out, as it was a relatively short drawing in a style that was completely unfamiliar to me, but it still came out looking interesting. It's kind of just a blob of nothingness, but you can actually get some impression of what's going on. I want to try some more of these, they're a lot of fun.

Today's long-pose session was one of those ones where you just have to sit back and say "fuck".

Specifically, if you look at the drawing, you will note that for some unknown reason, even though I tried to be very careful, my block-out and subsequent drawing managed to insert a phantom space of about a half an inch into the drawing in between the breasts and the collarbone.

Why on earth does this happen?

I have no idea.

And the worst part is that, obviously you don't quite realize that (for whatever reason) during the block-out, and you think you've gotten everything roughly right, but then when you start drilling down you realize that this piece was a wee bit higher, and this piece was a tad lower, and so on, and all of a sudden this one part of your drawing has been elogated irreperably

The worst part is, you always realize this just a little bit after it's too late to erase it, because you've switched to compressed charcoal pencil.

Yay.

But I've got another long-pose session coming up on Sunday, so we'll see if I can tighten things up on that one.

Today was a really fun studio session, lots of 20 to 30 minute poses. I thought they all came out pretty well, but I was a little off today on all of them so none are really that good.

Still all charcoal sticks on newsprint, like last time - I tested to see if I could switch to pencil on the very last one, and even though I rushed I didn't have nearly enough time, so it's entirely an aborted drawing. I'll know not to try that next time - pencil is for long-poses only!

I think between Wednesday and today I got a lot of good practice on blocking in, and I really think these 25-minute poses are the right length for me at this time. It gives me time to step back from the easel and compare multiple times, and make corrections and so on, which has been really good. I've also gotten more practice blocking in light and shadow, which is good because I am trying to transition away from contour fixation...

Next week will be two long-pose sessions, so time to get mentally prepared for that :)

I couldn't have been happier with today's open studio. I was very pleased with the entire session, and I thoroughly enjoyed drawing the entire time.

It was a short-pose session today, which is my favorite. I did a lot of drawings - ten two-minute poses, six five-minute poses, two twenty-five-minute poses, and one fifty-minute poses. Some of the two-minute and five-minute poses came out OK, but on the whole they were nothing special - I feel like I'm just getting back into the groove after my horrible showing at class last week.

The first twenty-five minute pose came out fair, but its fatal flaw is that I let the crossing arm mess me up, so the proportion changes across the arm boundary and the figure looks disconnected as a result. If I could've pulled it together more, I think this would've been a nice drawing, but as it stands it's not very good.

The second twenty-five minute pose came out well I think, but I ran out of time to really get it down so there's still a fair amount missing. It looks quite a bit like the model looked so I was happy with the amount I was able to finish.

The fifty-minute pose, I could not have been happier with. I was just so much fun to draw, the entire time, and there were so many interacting elements that I was very happy when the initial ten-minute-or-so block in really looked like everything was in the right place. I concentrated a lot on just getting the dark and light area in after that, and I think the drawing is really solid. Unfortunately, it seems to not look so good when photographed, probably because there's a lot of charcoal in there, and it's hard to pick up the contrast. I think the drawing looks a lot better when I look at it in the sketchbook.

Much better today. I was able to undo a fair amount of the damage from Thursdays horrific figure drawing class. I think I have decided at this point that interrupting my Thursday programming to go to class is either a complete waste of my time, or actually a negative impact on my progress, so I shan't be going anymore.

Harry came to studio today, which was awesome, because I had someone to chat with and talk about drawing with. It's his first time back to open studio for quite some time, but it didn't look like he'd lost his touch at all. He did 3 drawings: a quick block-out, a charcoal drawing, and a drawing with some chalky pink stuff which he told me what it was called but I forgot. They all looked great, and the charcoal one looked particularly cool. If he sends me digital photos of those, I'll put them up here as well.

As for me, the drawing came out OK, I was pretty happy with it. The block out wasn't bad, and it was really easy to do, unlike Thursday's. I had a really nasty angle - about 160 degrees from the light source - so almost everything was in shadow. So the shading was tough, but it came out OK. Overall, I'm pleased, and I'm just happy to be back on the right track. Wednsday's open studio should be fun.

Also of note, I showed Harry an unopened eraser that I had bought off the materials list from the drawing class, but had never been shown how to use. He opened it up and smushed it up like play-dough, and showed me that it's a "kneadable eraser" - this thing you can basically bend into all sorts of funny shapes and then dab at your drawing with. How cool is that? Pretty fucking cool I think.

Today was absolutely horrible.

Not only could I not draw, but I couldn't see either. It honestly got to the point where I was questioning whether my eyesight (which admittedly is not great, but is certainly functional for the task at hand) was too bad for my distance from the model, and that's not a good place to be.

I felt that neither my blocking nor my contour work, nor my solids, were coming out anything like the model. I didn't like anything I drew, at all.

I am greatly looking forward to Sunday's open studio for a chance to redeem myself.

Today was a single long-pose day, so I essentially had two options. Either I could try my luck with the whole thing, or I could do lots of drawings and move around the room. I was feeling very slow and methodical today, so after the 10 warm-up gesture poses, I decided to just try the long pose and see what happened.

In previous studios, I had had moments where I was drawing something, and I realized that I had checked where a line should be in more than one fashion. Like, first I had used drop-lines (my favorite), then I checked the "negative space", then I checked distances, etc. It was kind of this mental process of seeing a number of different conspiring things that told me where to put the line. It felt really good, so tonight I decided to do the entire block-in diagram that way.

I was extremely pleased with how it came out. I think the block-out was dead-on, and had all the balance and proportion as good as any other drawing I've done, especially considering it is a female model, and an oddly proportioned one at that. I was especially happy with the block-out, because the model was actually posed substantially different from my viewpoint for each 25-minute block, but I was able to compensate for this without too much trouble (although I can definitely see problems in the drawing where I wasn't able to do a good enough job).

The block-out took about an hour. I then had a little over an hour left, and I really wanted to try doing some work on the face. So I switched from the charcoal stick to the charcoal pencil, and did the best I could on the detail work. I really haven't practiced any detail work previously, except when I got bored during class at one point, so I was very slow at it. After spending the entire rest of the studio (about an hour and fifteen minutes or so, when you subtract the model breaks), I was only able to finish her upper body. It's too bad really, because I was having a great time and I would've loved to finish the bottom half, which I had already blocked out.

Well, today was not too bad but not too good either. The gestures went quite poorly today, I think. I was trying out some new things, like making tick marks and looking at them without lines, and that did not work very well for me. After the fast gestures, we had 3 poses for 45 minutes each.

The first pose I handled too timidly I think. For some reason I was not really getting the job done on this one. So it came out pretty bad, and each part looks like it was drawn separately.

The second pose went pretty well in the main section, I think, and I felt like I really figured out the volumes well, but the legs just did not work. Her right leg looks entirely too long, even though I actually had to shorten it from where I thought it was when looking at it. I think this might have something to do with the fact that I drew part of it during the first 20 minute block, and the other part during the second 20 minute, and I suspect that the pose was slightly different and I was never able to mentally re-adjust for some reason. Anyway, point is I fucked it up.

The third pose came out the best, I think, because it was a pretty tricky arrangement from the back. But I think I got the hips, butt, and legs pretty well, it's just the back that didn't go so well. The model moved around a fair amount, and I think I kept drawing in little parts as they were at that time, instead of looking at the whole back and making it work together. The result is that it's not properly balanced with the pelvis, so it looks like the figure is slightly off balance, which she wasn't (she was leaning on the stool, not falling away from it). But, again, anything that looks proportionally right and is female is a step in the right direction for me, so I'm not going to complain.

For this class, the model was this really cool looking dude, who looked almost like a cross between Christopher Reeve and Leonard Nemoy, if you can imagine that. I really wished I was good enough at this point to be able to draw faces, because he'd just be an awesome dude to capture on paper. But at this point I'm still having a hell of a time just getting the basic proportions down, so no such luck.

Anyhow, overall this was definitely my best showing thus far. Some of my gestures had a pretty bad extended torso problem, and I think this is because the lesson for the class was ribcage/pelvis location, and apparently I did not pass the lesson very well on these gestures :) But the final drawing was a reclining pose where the feet were basically at the base of my easel, and the head was a full six plus feet away. So I was totally like "whatever" because I figured that between the hard pose, the hard perspective, and the fact that the easel is in front of me but I was actually looking down on the model, I figured there was no way the drawing was going to come out at all. So I was absolutely ecstatic when it actually came out quite nicely! This is the first drawing I was really happy about.

For this open studio, the regular model did not show up, so we had a substitute. She kind of had a weird figure that was tall and bony, so it was somewhat easier to read out the structure, but it was also hard because not many women are six feet tall so the proportions were harder to conceptualize.

These were the first female gestural sketches that I thought came out well at all. They're still really bad, but there were a lot less gross proportion mistakes than previously, and some of them at least looked cool, like number 4 which despite (or perhaps because of) the obviously misplaced elbow, looks neat to me and suggests the pose of the model to me as it looked at the time.

At the end I did two 10-minute sketches of the model that came out OK. Number 18 is a horrible drawing of the model, but for some reason, all the proportion mistakes coincided to end up making it look like an OK drawing of a much younger version of the same model. This was pretty neat. It'd be cool to learn how to do that on purpose, like being able to draw the child version of an adult model, or the elderly version of a young model. But I imagine that's something only a really great artist can do, because being able to purposely play with the age of a drawing just seems so incredibly advanced to me. Number 19, on the other hand, is not bad. I think it looks somewhat like the model, and I was pretty happy with it, especially given my bad luck with drawing females thus far.

For Sunday open studio, it was back to a female model. Which meant more pain and suffering for me. It was a single, long pose session, so basically I just drew the same damn thing over and over again, and it came out absolute shit every time. Like, there was literally not a single drawing that looked anything like the model. Nothing even suggested what the model looked like at all. Complete failure. So at the end, I decided to just take my last quick sketch and color it in for fun.

Overall, the shading came out OK. I could probably do a lot better at it, using my l33t 3D graphics programmer skillz, but at this point I was just so frustrated with how bad the sketches were that concentrating on shading was beyond pointless. So basically this studio was a complete wash. Although Harry says that one of his professors at art school said,

"You have a hundred thousand bad drawings in you, and it's my job to get them out of you as quickly as possible. Let's get to work."

This was the second class, and the first time I'd drawn a male model. I found that the male model was way easier to draw than the previous two female models. I don't know why this is. Harry told me that this was psychological, that it is in general just as easy to read out the structure of a female form as it is a male form. Perhaps he is right, but so far I haven't been able to "un-psychologicalize" it :)

I was particularly happy with the way some of the gestures came out this time. The gesture drawings from this class were the first drawings I've done where I actually felt like I was conceptualizing the model in my head properly. Specifically number 2 and number 3 suggest the model much better than anything I had drawn previously. That was very nice because most of my previous drawings were pretty discouraging, because it felt like it was pretty much random as to whether or not the parts came out proportioned and placed properly.

After the first class, I was pretty scared (you can ask Cara about it, I was extremely nervous). So I knew that I would need a lot of practice to be able to get any good at this, and not be just helplessly lost in the class. The same school that offers the classes also has open studios, where you can go 20 times for $100, and they're 3 hours each, so it's really cheap to get a lot of hours in. So I bought a 20-session card for that and started going right away.

This is the first one I went to. There were people there with some pretty crazy shit. They had little tackle boxes of art supplies, everything from little chalk pieces to utility knives (literally - like a carpenter-grade utility knife). Some of them were very picky about things like where the lamp would be placed, how long the poses were going to be held for, what kinds of poses they were going to be, and so on. The downside of this was that almost all the poses except the initial warm-up set were long - 20 minutes each, sometimes with two sessions of the same pose. So I just drew the same pose over and over since Checker said that was what I should work on - quick gestural drawings.

These are my very first drawings of a live model. It was also the first time I'd ever drawn on an easel, or with charcoal and newsprint. It took a little getting used to, but wasn't that much different than drawing with a pencil and paper.

For the most part, I didn't understand anything the instructor said. She told us to make long sweeping lines that "suggested" what the figure was doing. I still don't really understand what the benefit would be to doing this, but that is perhaps the 3D graphics programmer override kicking in.

The drawings are mostly just quick jots, except for the last one, since at that time the instructor had the model hold that pose for a half hour or so while she walked around to everyone. So I went ahead and drew for a while so it's more finished looking.

The abortive attempts at drawing the model from the front were really scary for me - it was like I had no idea what I was looking at for some reason. I could get something that I thought looked right, and then it would look wrong again, and then it would, and wouldn't, and argh... it just sucked.