Drawing Naked People in New Media

Drawing Naked People in New Media

I’m taking Life Drawing II this half-semester term, with III coming in late August (and one more to go after that). This has been interesting, this drawing naked people thing. My instructor at Squak Art Studio in Issaquah, WA tells me that after a while, it stops feeling weird and you just see shapes. I think I’m almost there when drawing women, but not quite with men. Part of what stops me is fascination with how they could just stand there naked in front of all these people. I’m not actually sure if these models are, because I’m obviously watching videos of them and I don’t know if there are students in there when they’re recording (though they actually run the length of time we’re supposed to work, so we have to deal with a naturally-moving model). 

Anyway, to liven things up, the weekly exercises are sometimes a little different. This week we had to draw three different poses uses media we hadn’t used before. Some previous students did really wild things, like peanut butter or chili powder glued on. I was not feeling so adventurous. I thought it would be interesting to do one of them in silver and gold foil (I’m using imitation sheets) since although I have already done it on the illumination project, I am definitely still learning it. It’s not easy to make it look good. This one turned out better than I expected, though I didn’t do the thing he’s sitting on, so it looks a little odd. Also, it’s hard to photograph the shiny stuff and you can barely see the difference between the gold and silver. But here’s that one:

man sitting in gold and silver foil

I chose to do the next one in blue ink (with brush) since I’m wanting to learn that, and since I will be doing it on the book illumination project. This one didn’t turn out that exciting, but I learned a little about working with the brush, and was pleased to see it didn’t buckle the paper much (this was a concern I had since I’m working on printer paper for the illumination project). Here it is:

man holding staff from side blue ink

The other exercise we had to do this week was in preparation for the week’s project (a self-portrait): a study of heads using a planar approach. This isn’t that exciting, but it was a little interesting to see them this way. And I think it did help me to get a better sense of the true three-dimensionality of the head. Here are a couple of them (the second one’s a little blurry):

side view of head study
angled side view of head study