Back to school

My teaching responsibilities resumed a couple weeks ago; hence the slower rate of posting on this blog. But today was another back-to-school day: Life class resumed. I decided to ease into things by drawing rather than painting. These first two sketches were 10-minute poses. Sorry about the ghosted lines in these photos; I was using thin newsprint for practice, and I didn’t realize it would be semi-transparent, heh.

Geoff Watson, “Gesture study,” charcoal on paper, 18” x 24,” 2019.

Geoff Watson, “Gesture study #2,” charcoal on paper, 18” x 24,” 2019.

This longer pose turned out okay, except that I had trouble shading smoothly. Partly this was because my first stick of charcoal broke and I had to switch to a different type of charcoal mid-stream. Partly it was that I’m out of practice with charcoal and tried shading by hatching instead of just using the side of the charcoal. Still, there’s some nice stuff going on in this drawing.

Geoff Watson, “Sketch of Dakota,” charcoal on paper, 18” x 24,” 2019.

Secret watermarks!

I did these two charcoal figure studies in life class today.  This first one took about 10 minutes. For some reason, some sort of watermark showed through while I was shading!  Can you spot it?  

Geoff Watson, "Emily with secret watermark," charcoal on paper, about 9" x 12," 2018.

For the second, we had only five minutes.  But by golly, when I shaded, I uncovered another secret message!  I have no idea what's going on with the sketchbook I was using!  But I'm gonna keep using it because it's sort of hilarious.  :)

Geoff Watson, "Emily with a secret message," charcoal on paper, about 9" x 12," 2018.

Math and drawing: two approaches

What does math have to do with drawing? A lot, actually. In today's post, I thought I'd highlight two different approaches to drawing. These are time-honored methods that I've encountered in many books and art classes. They overlap, and I don't think one is necessarily superior to the other.

The first approach is taught by the instructor in my Saturday life session. He urges artists to start their drawing with straight lines, not curves. Part of his approach partakes of geometry. He emphasizes plumb lines to line things up, and he urges us to check angles and proportions constantly. And part of his approach reminds me of derivatives in calculus. To describe a curve, he suggests drawing the tangent to it in several spots, then gradually refining each tangent until the series of angled lines becomes a smooth curve. He discourages any shading until the basic contours are right. In this approach, you draw from the outside in.

Here's an example of one drawing I did with him on Saturday. You can still see some of the construction lines I used at the start. This was a short pose; I don't remember whether it was 5 or 10 minutes, but it was no more than that.

Geoff Watson, "Figure sketch using lines," charcoal on paper, 12" x 16," 2018.

The instructor at my Friday life session emphasizes a different approach. She urges us to mass shapes in without drawing contour lines at the outset. She wants light and shadow from the start. She encourages us to draw gesture lines with curves, not straight lines. She wants us to draw and paint from the inside out, not the outside in. Charles Sovek, in his fantastic book "Oil Painting - Develop Your Natural Ability," urges the same approach. This reminds me a bit of integration in calculus, in which you find the mass or volume under a curve. Or of the pretty curvy graphs you make in trig. OK, the connection to math may be more tenuous here, but I hope you get the picture (so to speak).

Here's an example of this more curvy, intuitive approach. This was a VERY quick gesture sketch -- 1 or 2 minutes, tops. So it's not really a fair comparison to the "linear" sketch above, which was a 5- or even 10-minute drawing. But I hope you get the idea.

Geoff Watson, "Figure sketch using mass," charcoal on paper, 12" x 16," 2018.