Friday, November 18, 2011

11.18.11

John, What a great idea for a blog! As usual, your drawings are wonderful and a pleasure to see. I look forward to contributing what I can to the discussion and to see how others have been influenced by McMullan’s High-Focus drawing program.
Here are a few 10 minute drawings of Vanessa, a model from my class at SVA. The things that intrigue me about the poses, (and the dress), are the same things that give me trouble. The on-again-off-again view of the figure underneath the dress makes it harder for me to understand where everything is. It’s particularly hard to understand how the legs are working. At the same time, I love the way the dress can magnify an action and echo the movements of a pose.
Since I don’t have the information of the legs to help set up the balance in the poses, I end up jumping from drawing the feet to drawing the torso and head, trying to see their spacial relationships to each other. I love the distance that the fabric travels as it wraps, folds, and stretches it’s way around in response to each pose. Sometimes it wraps like ribbon around the volumes of her body, describing forms moving in space. Other times it hangs free from her anatomy, moving down until it meets the resistance of the model stand and begins to pile up on itself. I really gave in to drawing the flowing lines of the dress - probably to the detriment of some other aspect of the drawings.

1 comment:

  1. Beautiful Rob! Thanks for posting and I'm glad you're going to participate.

    You hit the nail on the head when you wrote,
    "The things that intrigue me about the poses, (and the dress), are the same things that give me trouble."

    That is precisely what I hope to get out of this blog: a discussion of our responses and how we worked to reach for the truth as we saw it.

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