Did I mention that I am usually on a motorcycle.  We have had 17 straight days of rain!  That makes it very difficult to get the art supplies from home to the group studio!  Exclamation!  Fortunately, we have these here interwebs.  There is a site that I have recently been playing around with called Posemaniacs.  It’s in Chinese, but google translater will fix that for you if needs be.  There may actually be an English version of it somewhere, but this one works fine for me.  Anyway, as you can see they have male and female muscular figures in 19,440 poses.  You can set a timer and let them rotate through a random slide show at set intervals.  If you see one you like, you can view it statically with the pose viewer.  I have been setting it for 30 seconds and doing ten minute drills.  This is exactly the kind of practice I need for my field sketching.

EDM 117

Dynamic Virtual Poses from Posemaniac

EDM 117, draw hair or something hairy.  Recently, preparations have been in process for my 20th high school reunion.  I have been poring over old photographs and sharing stories with my family.  Mostly, I have been posting embarrassing pix to Facebook.  I graduated in the 80’s so there are TONS of pictures of mullets and bangs.  Guys and girls alike would go through a can of Aquanet every week.

For the last three weeks, I have been going to figure drawing with the Oklahoma Artists Guild.  Since I was not an art major in college, I had never been in a figure drawing group before this.  I wasn’t even sure it was available outside of university life.  The first two weeks of the month they do a series of short poses between five and twenty minutes.  The third and fourth weeks of the month, they do long poses.  From 7-9, the model assumes one pose and stays there (except for breaks).  These sketches are from the third Tuesday, a long pose session.  After the first break I found myself concentrating on the things that defined the model.  That is I focused on things like her hands and feet, her shoulders and her face.  Then someone pointed out to me that I could draw hands, feet and faces anywhere.  That was a very good point.  My time with the model was limited and I should focus on the shapes and folds, shadows, muscle and fat that support the clothes of everyone else.  I should do that, but I was more interested in the way her hands folded over her ankle.  On the last Tuesday of the month, instead of going to the second long pose session of figure drawing, I will be going to the OKC chapter of the Colored Pencil Society of America.  More on that next week.

Edm 103, salt and pepper shakers, was a fun challenge.  First I had to decide which of the 1000 different sets belonging to my lovely wife I should draw.  I like the spherical ones on our dining room table, which of course is what I chose.  I’m afraid, however, that I might have chosen them for the wrong reason.  I actually chose them because I was avoiding the glass and metal ones.  I am still intimidated by reflective surfaces so I avoid them.  That is unfortunate because the works that I admire most are the close cropped still lifes that involve glass marbles, puddles of liquid, or shiny bowls.  This is something I will definitely be working on.  Of course, I will post the lessons and the progress here for you to follow along.