HMoA Drawing Class - 05/07/13 - Quantae

Monday was another drawing class at the Honolulu Museum of Art. The model was Quantae; it's like drawing a super hero.

I was sort of in a bad mood on Monday, but this class made me feel so much better.  Drawing is great way for me to work out my problems. I was really happy after completing these drawings.

I am kind of happy with these drawing. I have been recycling pages I am unhappy with. The result in these cases is a very thick, almost impasto look to the drawings. The oil pastel is almost caked on to the page. The color is so thick and rich it looks almost like a painting.

There is also great spontaneity to these drawings. I have been told by other people in the class they love the movement I am able to capture in the drawings. Looking at these three pages, I am really fascinated how the figure seems to coalesce from the chaos in the background. 

I have been a little worried about muted colors. I have this great fear that the reuse of old pages and the reworking of drawing upon drawing will leave me with a hideous brown mess. The "fear of mud" is what I'm coming to call it.

In the drawing above the orange in the main figure really keeps the figure together on the page. I am a little more dependent on outline in this drawing, but I really do like the result. The variation in shadow from the dark to the light is very subtle in the form itself. The outline is really needed to keep the figure separate from the background.

I really like how the right arm falls behind his body. There is some really nice color shifts that subtly detail the forms of the arm.

This figure is kind of neat. It is the second long pose of the night. I had to move to a different area of the room to get this view of Quantae.

The figure is well done. I can see I rushed a bit in some places. I am a little unhappy with the shadow on the left of the page, but I still am very happy with this page.

I really like the yellow ocher pieces of this page. It's really visible in the chair and the space under his arm. It is a nice vibrant contrast to the subtle shifts in most of the page. I think it adds to the mood of the page. 

The shadows on his stomach are rather dramatic. The blue ink is really doing a lot of neat things there.

This was the last pose of the night and I am really happy with it. It is very similar to the first drawing, although it is less dependent on the outline.

There is really nice play between the very vibrant and the very muted colors. It is creating a neat contrast in the drawing. I do like the play between them in most of the figure. In the leg and the knee it is a dynamic transition between the muted gray yellow ocher color showing the highlighted flesh, then the really vibrant burnt umber and orange and finally the muted blue of the background. It really is focusing and moving the eye around the page.

All in all I had a really good night.

"The thing you really believe in always happens... 

and the belief in a thing makes it happen." 

~ Frank Lloyd Wright