Figure Drawing with Tommy Van Auken

During the first few weeks of the school year, artist Tommy Van Auken came in and taught lessons on figure drawing. We started off with gesture drawings:

This is a one-minute gesture, and with these, we were trying to show the overall movement of the body and get the pose and proportion. These got easier the more we practiced, and I think it helped to get larger lines of movement first, and then use the searching line to build the figure

This drawing was a longer gesture, around five minutes. With this one, I did a loose gesture and then built a little more on top of it to define the arms and legs.

We also worked on contour lines, which follow the edges of the shapes in the figure. In the drawing below, on the left, I started to get into some contour, but you can see it more in the right drawing. With that one, I used charcoal and conte crayon. I still did a gesture underneath, in order to have a guide for where the contour lines went

During the final week, we incorporated value, with a shorter study (15 min) and then a longer 45 min study on teh final day. We used subtractive drawing, and I think the main challenge was to keep the value scale consistent throughout the whole drawing. This is because an area can look very dark in comparison to what's around it, but actually still be a mid-range value overall. With my first drawing, my figure was done pretty small, so the details were more difficult. I made sure to fill the entire page with my second one, and I think it turned out pretty well. I had a lot of fun drawing the models, and I think I improved from last year's drawings.

15 min light study

45 min light study