Art Update

I've been taking a sculpting class for a few weeks now and I am loving it. It's nice to actually work on something with your hands - in THREE dimensions. I'll probably talk more extensively about sculpting, but for now I'll just post a few in progress stuff. The following two pieces were done during a live model session. The first one I had ten minutes to capture the pose in clay and then I spent a lot more time afterward refining it - working solely from my own knowledge of anatomy. Ugh, I hope it looks better in person than in these low contrast crappy camera phone photos. Looks very Gumby-ish here.

This next sculpture started from a 20 minute pose. I focused on the head and bust to give me a little more time to try to capture detail. It's really hard to see from these photos though.


My force drawing course ended last week. I have to admit, I feel completely enlightened. Let's go Buddha, fire me up to Nirvana. I feel like now I have a good grasp on what to look for in the human figure and how to capture it quickly. Look for force then shape, force then shape. I don't think I'll ever feel the emotional connection to the act of drawing that the instructor wants us to feel (he claims he's gotten students to cry from the experience), but I definitely find it more fun than frustrating now. One thing to keep in mind is to enjoy and invest in the process and not worry so much about the end product.

I also recently discovered that Berkeley has figure drawing sessions Friday evenings and Saturday mornings for $2 for students. Here's a few nekkid sketches I did from last Friday evening. These were from 20 minute poses, although I probably spent two to five minutes on these. After taking the force drawing course, I now find long poses to be boring, because the models have to find poses that they can hold for a long duration and tend to look static. The poses that models assume for 2 minute poses are much more dynamic and fun to draw. It also forces you to be quick. The first image is for you, Andrew.


Okay, you might find this weird, but one of the criteria I have for a good comic book artist is how well he can draw hair. Since 20 minutes is an eternity for gesture drawing, I just spent a couple minutes trying to do just that.

Hrm, whenever I look back on past work, it's never quite as good as I remembered it was as I was drawing it.