Edinburgh: Pencil sketches (NSFW)

As I wrote yesterday, Tuesday was a down day, and I almost considered not going to life drawing. But I’d told a new acquaintance I would be there (thanks, Aga!), and I did think it would be better not to mope at home, so I went. Good decision. After I arrived I found out I’d left my waterbrush at home, so I skipped the color this time, and just went with graphite pencil.

Maybe it was my mood, but I got off to the slowest start in ages. I stared at the model like I had never seen a human form before, and indeed that’s how I felt. It was the artistic equivalent of stumbling when you first get out of bed, or trying to speak when you’re nearly asleep. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and just did a blind contour drawing, and that helped.

A good thing I’ve noticed, when I’m feeling “off,” is it makes me more willing to experiment (mostly because I’m already convinced that whatever I do will be sh*t). I spent the next 15-minute pose doing a careful outline drawing of the model’s profile.

After that, I felt more ready to tackle volume and shading, but I was so slow about it that in the next pose I didn’t even get through her whole torso.

Things sped up a bit more after that, as I warmed up and felt better about what I was doing.

By the final two poses I was tired, so I tried a lighter approach, defining her form more with sweeping circles than lines and edges. I’ve never been able to do that with any success in the past, so I’m happy with how these came out.

I think there’s a big difference in my black-and-white sketches versus the color ones, don’t you? I kept thinking of a comment Lisa made on my last week’s drawings, about seeing things better in B/W. Anyway, it’s probably less important what I do than that I shake it up from time to time. Switching up my media is one way to do that, and so actually is drawing in a darker mood than usual. I’m very glad I went to All the Young Nudes; it was just the right thing to be in a room with all these other sketchers, with great music playing, and a ceilidh going on downstairs!