Top Secret

(Featured image: “Bacchanal” by contemporary Swedish painter Nicholas Alm. I saw paintings from this series at Arcadia Gallery in NYC during my trip.) 

 

For many emotions, what I’m about to show you must stay between us. These drawings are so bad. Are they bad for a first year student? Probably not as much. But they are not art. They’re not even good academic exercises. They’re not finished. They are self portraits of a struggling student. But they’re also cool! I turned form in the life room for the first time just before the new year. Below I’ll show my first attempt and my second long drawing in the life room when I really got to to flesh out the forms. I didn’t get to finish the process because believe it or not three weeks for this sort of charcoal drawing is actually not
an excessive amount of time. I depleted the time limit four more days by spending weekend of weddings in New York. Admittedly, that was a high price for a completely worth-it time drawing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, seeing seriously beloved friends, and attending two very meaningful weddings.  Did I mention I ran into Tom Hanks in the the Subway? 42nd St, J train platform. What was he doing there? Looking so much more handsome than I ever gave him credit for. Men, camel colored coats are in.

On to the drawings. First, we have the previous drawing I did where I was testing the water of form turning.

Phase 1: blocking in the drawing     Phase 2: making shadow shapes     Phase 3: turning form

      

And here’s the more recent drawing. We’re looking at a study of the pose and then the block-in with shadow shapes shaded in.

Finally we have as much form rendering as we could get to!

Featured image: “Bacchanal” by contemporary Swedish painter Nicholas Alm. I saw paintings from this series at Arcadia Gallery in NYC during my trip. The painter comes from the atelier tradition and makes beautiful figurative and allegorical paintings.