homework

master work

I begin like I would for a live model, making my begining gesture marks lightly. However, for photographing purposes I am making them a bit darker than usual. I start with a loose, rythmic motion searching for position and body posture. What I am not doing, is using any specific measurements yet, I want to get a feel for the general placement first.

From here I locate the three masses and try to gesture them in as relatively similar as I can without measuring tools. Again, I want a light fluid motion of placement, nothing heavy, and a beginning of recognition of points.

It is after this that I begin to look for more correct locations and placement with measuring tools. I always look at overall width at the widest points and higth at at the tallest points, so I begin with comparative measuring seeing how many heads tall and wide. For me, that makes the most sense, and I add lines lightly all the way across the figure and beyond, however they are very light. On my master work I did mark measuring points with a colored pencil.

I made little ticks to count over width, which was about 7 1/2 heads wide, and down about 2-3 heads at the tallest point. I like taking lines all the way across to help see where to measure down for key areas like, how far down the knee is in relation to overall width. I just keep working from most obvious key areas to the smaller and less obvious. Most obvious being placement of shoulders, knees, lenght of legs and arms; less obvious are things like width of arms and legs as well as length of feet and hands, however, all of these matter in the proportion and how the figure looks overall. In finding these I use plumb lines, level lines, and angle dropping to see where intersections are of the key points I mentioned. I don't erase as I am discovering these, I like to use toilet paper to keep knocking the drawing down, keeping it light and soft (obviously not enough at times!), drawing over previous marks for more correct placement as I discover inconsistencies. Once I do feel like measurements are farely accurate comparatively, I may put in a shadow line at the end of the nose, or top of the lip, nothing detailed but just a general mark of placement - maybe and oval or sideways v for an eye socket, again, nothing detailed (or so I think sometimes!), but definately not there yet with this!! What is nice about using an old master is that it never moves or changes when learning to use measuring tools!!