Anyway, here's a bunch of drawings I've been doing in both figure drawing and on location, plus a few I just did on my own, in no particular order. Don't forget to click on the image to see a bigger version - apologies once again for the low picture quality - I've really got to get to a place where I can scan these instead of photographing them.
Here's a drawing I made with ink and a bamboo pen at the Old Bethpage Village Restoration - it's the marching band that they had there. They used old instruments and had uniforms and everything. Plus they were great to draw, they had some awesome faces. I started off doing a drawing that was a front-on view of the band until my teacher forced me to move, which made for a waaay better drawing. Trying to get interesting points of view is still something I need to keep in mind when I draw.
Here's another one from Old Bethpage - this is the bar that they had. I did this with acrylics and ink and a bamboo pen again. The place was actually really empty, apparently not many people come to visit on Sundays, so I had to do multiple drawings of the same guy. This doesn't look complete to me, but I think it starts to have a sense of space, and I just like the feel of the drawing. That, and the little girl at the counter was really amusing and really fun to draw.
This is one of the foxes at the Holtsville Park Zoo. It's watercolor and ink and bamboo (again). Again, I like this drawing for the feel of it and for some of the abstraction the wash beneath the line creates. I'm hoping to go back there soon, possibly to sell drawings like these of the animals, but even if that doesn't work out, just getting more drawings done there would be nice, they've got a lot of interesting animals.
Aaand here's a figure drawing! I did all of these drawings with acrylics and ink. I was trying to build up form using both, and I think it worked out pretty well, I especially like the way her arm looks, and I think it comes forward and space and wraps around. Her hand and foot are also pretty strong - the drawing itself is on the masculine side, though, and that's something I've had trouble with for a while, so I've got to work on that a little more.
I like this drawing because it has weight even just with a simple underlying abstraction. I just like that abstraction a lot - it gives it movement and rhythm, too. Once again, the drawing's a little masculine, though. I'm not sure what it'll take to fix that, but it's something for me to at least keep in mind.
I think this is one of the strongest figure drawings I've done in a while. This exercise is called 5 Pounds of Baloney - I'm not sure if I've ever posted a drawing like this on here, but basically the way the exercise works is you're supposed to draw a square on the page and draw the model as if she's been stuffed into that square without any space at all. It forces you to distort the drawing and take liberties with it and not be a slave to what's in front of you. Anyway, I like this drawing for a lot of reasons - it's got movement, it's got weight and dimension, the hands and foot are drawn well and have a lot of life to them (I've been having trouble with hands lately) and overall, the image just has an interesting mood.
Here's something out of my sketchbook - apologies about the glare on the image. It's mostly done in acrylics, but there's a bit of marker and ink in places. This started out as a bunch of drawings of my dog on top of each other that I started painting through, and then I went a little crazy with it. It doesn't exactly have a subject now, although my sister described it as looking like two shrimp having sex, so... make what you will of that. I feel like once again, this starts to have some weight and movement to it, and turns in space a little, and, at least for something in my sketchbook, it feels like a close-to-finished image. I was pretty satisfied that I was able to paint through something I'd already made and reinvent it, since that's often something I'm too scared of ruining an image to do.
This is the graveyard at Trinity Church. Once again, it's acrylics and ink and bamboo. I've been using paint a lot lately since I tend to rely too much on line, and I wanted to get away from mediums I used a lot at school, like marker. I did use ink lines to lay this out, so maybe I cheated a little, but I'd like to paint back into it and finish it, along with the other painting from Trinity Graveyard I'm currently working on. To me, this feels like it would make a good finished image as opposed to just a study, which is why I decided to post it - the drawing itself isn't complete, but as an image, I think it's relatively strong. I also like my color choice. Previously, when I used my full palette I've had a tendency to go all-out and get more caught up in color than the actual drawing, and so for a long time I've deliberately limited my color use. Here, my palette's limited, but at the same time more varied than usual, and I think it's starting to be successful.
Another thing I've been doing is long, continuous rolls consisting of one large drawing or several smaller ones linked together - it's difficult for me to get a good photo of one of them, but here's a link to one that my figure drawing teacher, Jeff Fisher took. Feel free to look through the whole album, or better yet, check out the whole class's body of work on his facebook - there's people that are my age, younger and older, with all variety of experience, and we're all getting better all the time, so I really recommend it. And if you happen to be around Long Island, you should definitely consider taking the class, too!
