30 Seconds of Joy

Thirty seconds to draw the human figure. Thirty seconds to get down the essence of the pose. Thirty seconds to put down so much with so little. Every line counts, but most lines aren't necessary. But which ones are right? Thirty seconds to decide which lines will do the talking, tell the story, and communicate it all.

If you've been wondering where I've been (yes, I'm referring to the handful of people that are kind enough to take an interest in this blog), I've kinda been wrapped up in my own development as an artist lately. Not to say that during school I'm not, but now I get to do all the little things that were simply after thoughts, stuck on the back burner, the things I really want to focus on. I get to work on my weak spots. I've gone full steam ahead into Bridgman's Complete Guide to Drawing from Life on the advise of my anatomy instructor from last semester. I must say this book is simply amazing. I'm only about a quarter of the way through this tome of artistic wisdom, and I feel like I've learned so much. But I'll save that for another post.

The really exciting part about being out of school is going out of the house to do life drawing. I found an excellent life drawing group that holds classes seven days a week. It just so happens that the two sessions for gesture drawing fall on times when I'm completely free. So I bought a membership, and have been drawing there twice a week on top of my Bridgman home study.

After a few weeks I finally built up the courage to post something. These classes are so hard because the poses only last thirty seconds to two minutes. Needless to say you learn quickly when drawing at this rate. These are all very crude drawings, but I am happy with them for two reasons:

1) I couldn't have done them the week before
2) You can tell what the figure is doing (THE GOAL)

Now I have a lot of work to do as far as loosening up and line quality goes, but I think I'm headed in the right direction with these classes, and I'll excited about what I'll be able to do by the end of the summer.

So after much belabor, here's the better, believe it or not, of weeks worth of work.