80 Minute Portrait Drawing

Here's a recent portrait drawing from the Al Hyter Portrait group. Usually I change drawing positions on every 20-minute pose, but lately I've been wanting to slow down and spend more time per drawing. Last week I sketched 40 minutes per drawing, but on this portrait I spent 80 minutes, the entire drawing session. It gave me more time to focus on all over details and building of darks and lights.

African American Woman Portrait Drawing

 

 I created some nice drawings at the Sunday morning Al Hyter portrait group. They have a new model. She's wearing a beautiful dress from Nigeria Africa.

A lot of artists attended so space was limited. I started my warmup with a side profile drawing. Then I was able to squeeze in front to draw a 3/4 profile. As always, I sat as close as possible to the model to see all the details of eye, nose, lips, ears.

I treated these drawings a little differently. Recently I finished updating my online illustration portfolio on theispot.com and noticed subtle changes in my drawing style. My older drawings seem to have more emphasis on technique: clean sketch lines, and more contrast between lights and darks.

So at this session I spent 40 minutes per drawing instead of 20 minutes. I slowed down to focus on my technique, and I kept using  sharp pencils to get nice clean dark lines in the details. I'm happy with the results. I'm looking forward to next week's session.

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Figure Drawing

First I want to say that figure drawing to the rock-n-roll band Queen is awesome! I attended Wednesday night figure drawing session in downtown Toledo, it was a great session. We had a good model, a good crowd of artists and Paul Geiger, the coordinator, played some good tunes starting with classical music and ending the evening drawing session with Queen. Looking forward to next Wednesday night's drawing session!

Interesting figure drawing evening for me, I had a lot on my mind and the music was fast paced so my technique felt different. My lines went dark fast and I felt I had less patience for the smaller details, so some personal emotions went into my drawings. It’s amazing how sometimes when I’m drawing I may be perfectly happy and free, or with a weight on my shoulders, or tired, or not motivated, or with some kind of distraction In my mind. And these emotions I know come out or are expressed in my drawings, So in my art/drawing there’s always a whole lot more going on then just good technique and skills.

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE, GRAPHITE ON PAPER 14" x 17"