progress

So I've been teaching for 6 weeks now and I wanted to show you my students' progress so far. Today, I bring you two of them. The first 2-3 weeks they used charcoal, to warm them up and teach them to be loose. Then starting in the 3rd week and completely by the fourth week, we were using pencils. I've stressed to my students that this figure drawing class is a study of the motion in the body. That there is an energy within the body that can be drawn, and that each of their drawings is merely a study... it's them visually thinking about the pose on paper. Once they can get past the idea of having a "finished drawing" they can free themselves to draw what they see and in a way that is much more moving than a clean drawing. (I sound like an idiot, so on with the drawings!)

This is Justine's work from the first week...

She had never had a drawing class before, so these are quite impressive. You can see in the torso and hips that she was thinking about the ideas I shared with them on the first day regarding the way the ribs and vertabre connect to the hips with this powerful energy... here is another drawing of hers from the first 2 weeks that shows that idea more.


And here is one of her more recent drawings in pencil... pencil allows us to be a little cleaner, but it's still important to draw as if you're thinking on paper (<-- more bable that only I understand... poor kids)


Now onto Mark, who actually goes to an arts' highschool. He's actually in a program right now where they curate a show rather than doing art... that's kinda interesting. Anyway, I think you can see that he came into the class drawing "marshmallow men".

Actually, this isn't so bad for him. When he first started drawing nudes, they were just cookie cutter outlines. This day, the model was clothed and the stretch in the fabric helped him out.

Here's a discussion he and I had about a couple of ideas... this is his drawing and my comments in red chinamarker.


Here is some of his work now that he's getting a better understanding of the energy ideas we've talked about.


I'll throw some of my work up here too, but I do have to note (if only for myself) that I only get to draw a couple of times in each class and I never get to do the warm ups, so a lot of this feels a little rigid to me, but I still like what I've done.