Figure Friday: All of it

I sometimes post a sketch or two from my weekly figure drawing session under ‘Figure Friday‘. Those weekly figure drawing sessions are many things to me:

• A way to stay in touch with drawing what I find hardest: the human figure.
• My weekly warmup session: miss a week and it shows in all my drawing.
• A time to experiment with new media: (sometimes, not this week).
• And a time to talk about art, seeing, what we’re working on with fellow artists.

Results don’t matter so much. Still, I usually select and post sketches that I think work. So this week I thought I’d post everything from one session. The ones that worked, the ones that didn’t and the huge majority in the middle, the meh ones. Much as I love it when things come together and work, I also just really, really love drawing. Drawing is hard, drawing means seeing so intensely it’s tiring. Drawing is frustrating. But I love the act of drawing.

We start with ten 1-minute poses. Charcoal on newsprint.

And then we move on to two 5-minute poses. I really struggled with the one on the right, so I drew, redrew, drew bits, but still didn’t get very far.

A 15 minute pose comes next.

And the last session is an hour-long pose broken up into three 20-minute sessions. Usually, I do a charcoal study or two in the first session, write up some notes for myself and then do some color studies in the next two sessions.

Watercolor Study #1

And closeups from it:

Watercolor Study #2

And closeups from study #2:

Alright, quick poll, just for fun:
Watercolor study #1 and watercolor study #2. Which one works better for you? And why?

Happy Friday!