Art & Story Blog

It’s been a while since I’ve posted some figure drawings. There are a lot of them, so I’ll post them in increments. Here’s the first batch. I think all of these are from April.

The above drawings were short poses, I’m not sure how long, from Karl Gnass’s class. Karl teaches us to concentrate on three main levels in drawing the figure.

1. Gesture (What is the Model doing? What’s the Story? The “Spirit of the Pose.”)
2. Conceptual/Volumetric Forms (Spherical, Cylindrical, Conical, etc.)
3. Anatomical Forms (Bone, Ligament, Tendon, Muscle.)

There are more levels beyond these three and of course, more that is involved with just these three, but these are the main ones, and the ones we start out with. They are three aspects of drawing the figure that we may examine separately or simultaneously. However, if we separate them and move through our drawing in the order of these three stages, we can begin to pinpoint our weaknesses. The goal in the end, I think, is to have each of these three support the other. You should not have anatomy which does not reinforce the gesture or help tell the story, or anatomy that does not describe volume or three-dimensional form, for example.

I found, in examining these stages, that I wanted to skip over the second stage. I didn’t like conceptualizing the forms of the figure into cones and cylinders, etc.. I felt like I was turning the model into a mannequin and anyway, I knew I could draw well enough to get those nice curves of the anatomy. Why mess around with this kid stuff? Well, what I realized was that although I understood a fair amount of the 3-dimensional forms in front of me, how they took up space, that’s not what I was drawing. Or rather, that is what I was drawing, but that’s not what I was communicating. I relied very heavily on the contour — the outline shape of things — and on duplicating those details, albeit in a stylized fashion, which seemed to be describing the form in front of me. Perhaps ironically, simply drawing what is in front of you is not the best way of describing what is in front of you. Now, to be honest, I did have some capacity to describe the 3D forms of things, but I was pretty lazy about it, really.

So, I am continuing to try and develop my skills of “drawing in the round.” I still think I have a tendancy to fall back on my old ways of seeing the figure and it’s a constant struggle to see in a new way, but more and more when I look at my drawings, I’m seeing little things that I don’t think were there before. That’s exciting. And at the same time, there is a little nagging part of me that seems to mourn the old comfortable way of working. Growing pains.