Most of my gesture drawings usually start with the head tilt – unless the head is completely behind the body. If I were drawing small, I could have drawn more gestural details in one minute. Drawing big forces me to draw head details which usually takes up most of that one minute leaving very little for body details. These drawings were done on 18 x 24 newsprint paper.
Drawings for a children’s story written by my friend Yuriko Senoo. I was trying to get a feel for the main character – a seven year old Japanese girl who doesn’t want to wear traditional Japanese geta shoes for school.
A detail from a 20 minute long pose. The full drawing is in the book ‘Figure it Out – a thin book on Figure Drawing‘.
I end up drawing multiple poses on the same page. Sometimes they overlap – specially if I draw big. And I have been drawing big these days.
In short poses (five minutes or less), it is difficult to lay down an ‘accurate’, final line for forms at a first go. The difficult poses are fun to draw but harder for the model to hold it still. In the five-minute drawing above, I used multiple ‘noodly’ lines, drawn lightly, (refer to page 18 in the first edition of ‘Figure It Out – a thin book on Figure Drawing‘ for the explanation of the word ‘noodly’) to help with these two problems. This model had a really long neck – comparatively speaking.
Fashion drawings are fun. One of my favorite fashion illustrators is Rene Gruau. He knew human anatomy and was gifted with amazing craftsmanship. The exaggerations of the human proportions in his drawings and paintings aren’t boring – as is usually evident in many of the fashion illustrations these days. In fact, I don’t understand why it’s ‘required’ to draw 10 or 12 heads long human bodies in fashion illustrators. Why not just make the drawing interesting and appealing? Also, one should pay extra attention when models have their arms on their hips or stretch their arms pointing at something. It’s almost inevitable that the arms will move.
The drawing is fairly ruff – done with a charcoal stick. The focus was on the gesture and the drama of the lighting – though all the life-drawing sessions I attend, the resources for lighting the model are fairly limited. The model’s pose was great and she held it for two minutes.