Thursday, June 24, 2010

Life Drawing

"Mei" -18" x 24" - Conte crayon on smooth newsprint
Life Drawing by Greg Newbold

I am back teaching figure drawing as well as head painting this summer term at BYU in the illustration department. It's a lot of fun to be able to draw from life every day so I am looking forward to drawing alongside the students. Yesterday we had a terrific Asian model named Mei. She was rock solid holding the poses while simultaneously giving really good lines. She was a lot of fun to draw. We are concentrating on short drawings right now in this class with lots of gestures and poses under an hour. I really want the students to learn to capture the essence of the figure and pose in a short time frame. It's so disappointing when you see a drawing that someone obviously spent a lot of time on but is lifeless or the anatomy is all wrong. The philosophy in this class is to capture the life of the figure rather than laboriously rendering the figure. I spent about thirty five minutes on this drawing.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great drawing Greg! The figure looks solid in space and the economy of line and shading gives a fresh, spontaneous look.
You've got lucky students!

Unknown said...

Thanks Ron, it was a lot of fun and I have some really good students this term. I expect they will make some great drawings before we are done.