30 min pose figure drawing

This one is from October 5th. conte on newsprint

Plein Air Field Sketch

Today I met some artist friends at the local farm area called GreenBluff. Its right up the hill from where I live. This is a rough two hour sketch of the fall fields of cabbage and corn. I am taking tons of photos, trying to squirrel away reference photos for winter time work when we are snowed under with five feet of snow. The locals are all saying it could snow anytime now. sheesh...I'm not ready!!!

three hour portrait

Jack was this week's model in the figure drawing group. He did a great job of holding still for three hours (with a few minutes break every 20 mins or so). I think I captured the likeness ok, but I still have a long way to go to get a finished portrait done in three hours time. The oils are starting to come easier to me and I'm excited to keep going with them.

Figure Drawing Sept

Here are a couple of figure drawings I did at Terry Lee's studio this week. I am really rusty at this. I haven't done figure work since college in 1974!! Holy Cow. I used graphite pencil on the grey one and sanguine conte stick on the rusty one- both on newsprint. I should switch to charcoal sticks, but I make a pigpen mess with them and my face and hands end up as black as the paper, so...I will switch to toned paper next week and stick with contes. I am trying to fine tune my eye and observations with out using any scaling tools like triangulation or measuring. I start with the head shape and scale and compare everything off of that visually. The down side of that is that the pose changes before I can get the lower half of the figure finished, but that's ok, its not about having a finished drawing, its about training the eye.
The top one is a 2 minute pose

student works at Terry Lee's Studio

Here are a couple of snapshots of the interior of Terry Lee's studio in Coeur D'Alene Idaho where I am painting and drawing from live models. He teaches sculpting and does bronze work for galleries in addition to his huge animal paintings. Check out his website www.TerryLeeArt.com

Plein Air Study

I am meeting with a group of plein air painters once a week and this is a field sketch from a beautiful park in Idaho called Corbin Park on the Spokane River.

The red scarf

I found an artist's studio in Coeur d'Alene who has figure drawing each monday night with a model. Twice a month is a three hour pose, twice a month is figure drawing with short poses. This was the three hour pose. Talk about having to work fast!