Figures - Indirect Lighting

     These are figures drawn with a tortillon and Prismacolor graphite pencils. Naturally, the curvature is highly exaggerated. On my next go, I’ll use Vilppu as a guide for understating the midtones. I have a feeling it will be a somewhat less than graceful transition, much like my move from construction to shading. You’ll notice the musculature poking through the figures. That’s because I still haven’t mastered visualization; I automatically put down the construction lines even when I don’t need them. I’ll grow out of it eventually.

     You can tell I’m still having trouble with the pelvis and all the muscles that connect to it. This is good because it’s just the one problem structure, but bad because that structure happens to be the centerpiece of every pose.

     I’ve surprised myself with the look of these figures, but their small size is prohibiting true detail.  I have no choice at this point but to do full-page figures (then again, I can always draw individual body parts in larger scale). Vilppu had giant post-it easel pads. All I have are 9 x 12” sheets, and I’m not about to buy anything bigger until I’m certain to use it properly. That being said, I’ve been ordering all of this from Amazon, and I think I’ll browse the local Michaels store for interesting tools and media.  

     This exercise was simple. Vilppu repeatedly instructs: “Do not copy the model; analyze it.” When drawing a pose, I kept catching myself copying surface shapes rather than constructing the form of the model. So, what you see below are gestures taken from sight (with a few important landmarks), then I put the photos away and the rest of the figure was done from memory or knowledge of anatomy. At this stage, I should probably switch back to analyzing from sight, but for future reference, the idea is to achieve this kind of accuracy from as simple a gesture as possible.

     I tried to understate the midtones in figures 9 and 10. 9 came out fine, but 10 was an awkward pose to begin with.