Open studio on Sundays

Every Sunday we hold open studio at Janus Collaborative.  It is a full-day uninstructed drawing/painting session, usually over three Sundays, that is open to everyone, Janus and non-Janus people.  For me it is a very precious day, not only because I get to practice the figure some more, but also because I feel more free to experiment.

For the pose that ended his week, I tried painting on those cheap cotton canvas panels.  Never again!  They are too absorbent and too grainy.  I am usually very tolerant of poor materials, but these panels are not good for delicate work.  Maybe some experiments are better done on still lives :)

For the pose before that, I had 6 hours, so I decided to do an extended portrait.  We have a portrait sketch class that lasts 3 hours, so I had the opportunity to push the work further than usual.  I typically like work that is a little more painterly and shows the hand of the artist in the brushstrokes etc, but the longer I worked, the smoother the surface got.  I was not trying to blend or gradate very carefully, but it seems that this is the effect that I got when I tried to get intermediate values after my first pass (with some exceptions like the forehead).  Perhaps part of it is due to the paper that I was working on, but for the most part I think I was probably too timid with my paint application.  We have another 6-hour session next Sunday and I will take another shot at a portrait, only this time trying to be more deliberate with my brushstrokes.

I am posting the portrait below even though it has sunken in.

Open studio | Portrait sketch

Drapery study

 

Drapery study

 

I haven’t blogged in a while, so my goal is to post a few things to catch up on what I have been doing all this time.

The first one is a drapery study we worked on with Michael Grimaldi.  It was good practice and a lot of fun.  It also made me realize how incredibly hard it is to paint the figure, with all its subtleties of form that, when off even by a millimeter, look awkward.  Still, the drapery has many challenges, especially in getting the feel of the material.  It is also a good exercise on edges.  Sometimes you need to make things turn sharply or by a lot within a small distance.  Creases are hard, too, as are funky overlaps and folds.  Making local discoloration of the fabric look convincing (as opposed to a mistake in paint temperature or value) is an additional concern.  And while you are dealing with all this, you must always keep in mind the form underneath: what does the person’s pose look like and does the drapery sit correctly on the body, does it give us the right information about the structure that it is resting on.  After all, the ultimate goal is not to paint drapery for the sake of drapery, although this could be an exercise in iself, but to paint drapery as an element of the figure.

Ok, I guess not so simple anymore :)

Dress Form | Final Painting

Dress Form | Final Painting

I just realized I never posted a picture of the final version of my dress form painting, although it has been a while since I finished it.  I also neglected to take photographs of intermediate stages.  What I found most challenging about this painting was how to approach finer forms and details (such as the wires).  I think that some schools would advise me to draw them in at the beginning and then paint them at the same time as everything else around them.  However, since my goal is to be more painterly and to build pictures in layers, I was afraid that such a practice might force me to paint too thin and too stiff.  Moreover, I thought it would be hard to give the impression of continuity in the background element if I had to paint it piecemeal.  As a result, I decided to paint the big forms first and then add the details on top.  For example, I painted the dress form first and then added the stitches and letters on top, wet on wet.  I did the same thing with the wires: I painted the wooden bench in the background first and then painted the wires on top, only I think I let the bench dry first.  For this I boldly decided to lose the drawing and find it again later!  Adding those details was extremely nerve-racking because I felt that if I messed them up I wouldn’t be able to fix them without ruining what was underneath.  I am not sure whether there is a preferred way to work on things like that.  Another area that required special consideration were the lines of the frame.  Getting the long sides straight, parallel to each other, and vertical in relation to the ground was pretty time consuming, especially when I realized how many there were!  The surprising part was that I tried using a ruler for them, but it didn’t work because the paint was slipping under the ruler, making smudges.  So I had to draw them freehand, which was not as bad as I thought.  The short sides were challenging to do, too.  Because they indicated the perspective of the image they were very important, but they were angled pretty extremely from my eye level, so that made it hard to get them accurately.  It would have been nice to have a very long brush :)

I don’t know why the colors look so washed out when I post the image…  I may try to replace the image with a better one soon.

Anatomy for artists | Head and Neck 2

On our last day at the dissection lab, we were free to review any part of the body that we wanted, as the medical students were done with their dissection and had pretty much cut through everything.  I chose to continue working on the head, which was by now detached from the body and cut in two halves along the median line.  This made it easier to look at the planes of the head and the bony projections that Michael Grimaldi emphasizes.  Michael gave a short demo on how he draws the head, using landmarks like the top of the head, chin, mastoid process, brow ridge, line of the mouth etc as well as looking for planes like the most frontal plane of the forehead or the triangular plane between the glabella, side of mouth, and angle of the ramus.  He constructs the head always keeping in mind perspective, aided by parallel draw-through lines and side drawings of the box that approximates the head.  What is interesting in cadavers is that the soft parts have been squished out of shape or position.  Noses, for example, tend to look like broken noses, not following the general direction of the head.  Eyelids are often the same, too. 

Below is my attempt to draw a head following the same line of thought:

Anatomy for artists | Cadaver head

I sat at the head of the cadaver, looking down and upside down at it, which combined an unusual angle with some foreshortening.  I found it helpful to flip my drawing in order to check it, just because your knowledge of what a head should look like can immediately signal if some part of the drawing is off (for example, a tilt of an axis), which is much harder to do when the head is upside down, hence more abstracted and more heavily reliable on careful drawing and measurement.  It is interesting how often people do the reverse, i.e., draw/paint normally and flip their canvases upside down to remove the figure from their knowledge of what it is and make it easier for themselves to check things like values.  Below is my head flipped (among other mistakes, I think the eye sockets could be wider; and the ears can be improved – they were tricky to do in reverse):

Anatomy for artists | Cadaver head flipped

Anatomy for artists | Head and Neck 1

This was the first of two sessions on the head and neck.  The medical students had made a vertical incision through the center of the jaw and had removed part of the bone on one side of the head.  They had also dissected parts of the face (mostly the sides/cheeks).  We were thus able to see some of the facial muscles, although the deeper layers were still unaccessible.  As expected, the muscles on the face, particularly the ones responsible for expression, are small and hard to distinguish from each other.  To make things harder, since the medical students are not looking for the same things that we are (they are also interested in nerves, blood vessels etc), they had not been very careful in their dissection and had cut through several muscles.  Fortunately, Dr. Silverman was there and he clarified things for us, with his usual exciting medical – rather than aesthetic – spin.  The cadaver that we were working on still had the platysmus on, so he couldn’t get into the muscles of the neck, which I am very eager to explore.  There were a number of cadavers with their neck muscles exposed, but we didn’t think of moving to them.  He promised, however, to cover them next week and to bring additional notes, so I am looking forward to that.

What I found more useful was drawing from the bodies and looking at the skulls underneath the flesh.  The tops of the skulls had been cut transversely for the brain to be removed, so you could peel down the skin to look at the forehead and then pull it back again to see how the head looks in real life (oxymoron).  Looking at the facial muscles in detail was not too helpful, first because they were so messy and second because I only draw models that do not make any facial expressions, so the muscles are relaxed.

As an aside, I would be very interested to draw poses with more extreme flexion of muscles, but these are hard to hold do not easily fit the time requirements of an art school.  Exceptions are model Mark Short, who posed pulling a rope last year, which was great, and Christophe Nayel, who can pose for 3-hour portraits holding laughing or weeping expressions, which are really fun!

Anatomy for artists | Pelvis and Upper limb

I didn’t blog about our anatomy session last week, so this post will cover both days, since both days were focused on the arm.

On the schedule, we were supposed to cover the pelvis and its articulations, which we did at the beginning of the session.  Some bodies were pretty deeply dissected by now, so we were able to see the major parts of the pelvis from the outside as well as from the inside as the abdomen had been removed.  Some parts of it, like the great trochantor, were obscured, but it was useful to see the overall bone as it is positioned inside the body.  Seeing the actual inguinal ligament shed light on what lies underneath the surface and causes it to appear the way it does.

After looking at a dissected pelvis, I found a cadaver that was at an earlier stage of dissection, with the body below the ribcage intact.  I did a quick drawing of the pelvis and upper legs, trying to identify the major anatomical points over the flesh.  I found this exercise particularly useful because it relates more to drawing a live model.  The advantage here was that the “model” was not moving and that, when I was in doubt, I could go up to it and palpate it to figure out the bones underneath.  I also had the dissected bodies as reference.  Moreover, the cadaver was in a crouching position, with the knees bent and the hips slightly turned, which gave it an interesting twist, very much like a real life pose.  The flesh looked a little weird, mainly because its folds were sharper than normal and the smooth parts were flatter, but it was still a natural looking body.

 

Anatomy for artists | Pelvis of cadaver

 

 

The pelvis did not take the whole day, so then we turned our attention to other parts of the body.  Different students decided to do different things.  Some were looking at the leg, others decided to draw.  I saw a couple of medical students dissecting a perineum, but I decided that, curious as I was, there was not much artistic anatomy relevance to it (probably not equally true for Courbet).  So I chose a body with its arms nicely dissected, identified all the muscles with the help of books to the best of my knowledge, and then proceeded to do quick sketches for them, always keeping in mind exactly what I was drawing.  I found that this could help me retain information better.  I did not put too much time in these sketches, as my aim was not to make a pretty drawing, but to memorize the anatomy.

 

Anatomy for artists | Dissected lower arm

Anatomy for artists | Lower limb

Back from another visit to the dissection lab at Drexel University, where we were scheduled to cover the lower limb.  I found it very helpful to review the bones and muscles of the region before the session.  I looked at diagrams in an artistic anatomy book and wanted to do a few drawings, too, but unfortunately I did not have time for that.  Just trying to memorize the drawings though was helpful because it gave me the shape, position, and function of the muscles.  The muscles on a cadaver are not always easy to discern because they are deflated or they may have moved around a bit and sometimes they are cut.  But looking at them with the theoretical knowledge of what is what (and where) made it so much easier.

The same doctor as last time came to help (I think his name is actually Dr. Silverman) and so did Dr. Hirsch, who I think runs the dissection program.  They explained to us the muscles of the lower and upper limbs and their function.  They also talked extensively about nerves, the medical explanation of genu varum and genu valgum, the Achilles tendon, and other things not directly applicable to figurative art, but certainly fascinating.  Then they proceeded to the gluteal region and showed us all the muscles, nerves, bones etc that we were admittedly having a hard time identifying before they came.  On a live figure, this region is primarily dominated by fat and it is fat that gives the body its shape in that area.  Seeing what is underneath, all the way down to the deeper layers, was very interesting.  I particularly liked seeing the piece of fascia that causes the crease of the behind and how the gluteus maximus continues below that.

After the lecture, the doctors left and we stayed at the lab by ourselves.  Some people started drawing right away.  I looked at some bodies a little more and reviewed the shoulder and arm.  It was interesting to see the points of origin and insertion and imagine how the muscles create motion (in a few cases, if you pulled the muscle, you could actually make a body part move; in most cases, however, the bodies were too stiff to move).  I also find it helpful to look at the fibers of the muscles and try to see if they affect the surface of the body.  After that, I drew for a little bit and then it was time to go.