Figure Drawing with Tommy!

I really enjoyed figure drawing. Every time I get to draw with a live model and short timed poses I find myself improving a lot with each drawing. In the moment I really hate how short all the poses are and how much I have to break poses down to basic movements, but being able to do that is a very valuable skill. This year also we got to do some more work with contour and value and our 45 minute study was like a big culmination of everything we had worked on. Overall I am very happy with my work and progression from this session, but I still have a lot to improve one. Primarily I want to be able to get my proportions right from the beginning instead of having to edit later on. I would also like to get more comfortable with using value and creating depth using middle values and building or subtracting from them.

Progress: ABEX #2

It did change a lot. As I kept going I tried to use different strokes and the different types of marks we practiced in class, and I think I leaned really heavily (maybe too much) into using the knife for a less fluid mark while using the larger brushes for big marks. I did not use finer brushes as much, and I only made a few marks with charcoal the entire time, but I still like the way that the colors interact and the contrast between the different marks. I want to add more texture but I am not entirely sure where and when I did try to add it it was just a large blue block in the middle which did not look good and I had to edit it out.

I also leaned more into the green to contrast the pink, while still trying to incorporate some of the blues and blacks from the beginning of my process. I changed the orientation at the end of one of the days and I was a lot happier with how the composition looked oriented vertically.

Progress: ABEX #1

Painting without a set figure is very very hard. Making my painting I tried to use some of the different pathways to abstraction we practiced in class and I think they worked fairly well but it was still difficult to translate a composition from my sketchbook to the canvas, and then deal with the changes as I kept going. I think it was really important to not get too attached to anything in my painting, as I ended up covering up a lot of the features that I had made intentionally in the beginning as we kept going. Even the background color was not what I intended.

Overall I am pretty happy with the start but I am sure that it will change significantly as I go.