The two sections of Bay’s Advanced Drawing and Painting have started the life drawing component of the class! Every week for 9 weeks students work for two hours in the studio space drawing from a live model who is dramatically lit. The experience of drawing the human form is an important one for a young artist for many reasons:
Observation: One of the most important skills to develop is being able to draw what you see in front of you. Building this sensitivity as an artist is vital. The consistency of practice is also important, and students see improvement in their work after each life drawing session. Students are becoming sensitive to line quality, how to block in shapes of shadow, and how to work quickly to capture the gestural pose of a person.
Skills Development: Building on the concept of observation, the best way to get better at drawing is to practice drawing. Figure drawing gives students the opportunity to process how to render forms with many different materials in the moment. Comfort leads to confidence, and students are working with ink, graphite, acrylic paint, china marker, and charcoal on many different types of surfaces.
Decision Making: Many students are used to working from photographs or 2-D resources, so drawing from life flips things around for them. All of the necessary visual information is there, but the “right” answer is not. Students need to make decisions for themselves about what they are seeing and how they depict it.
Running parallel to the life drawing sessions are homework assignments that ask students to capture the human form in a variety of situations using combinations of materials. The scaled up life drawing assignments encourage students to take risks with composition, materials combinations, and scale. Students have learned a lot about themselves as artists through working on 18 x 24 paper and they are challenging themselves to work with the figure in exciting new ways and perspectives.
Enjoy the gallery of images!
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