Master Class with Brian Smith

This Fall, I was in Brian Smith‘s Master Class in Life Drawing. Here are some of the highlights of the course.

In the first drawing, we added a drift to enhance the gesture in the contour drawing. In the second one, the drift was drawn first and the contour drawing was placed over top. We didn’t know what the gesture would be when drawing the drift. I was lucky that the model took a pose that went well with my orange wave. Then the model danced and we drew as she danced.

The first drawing is a memory exercise. The model, Ed, took a 10 min pose in a separate room. We had to walk to the room, study the pose, walk back to our easel and draw as much as we could remember. We could do this as many times as we wanted over the 10 min. I did pretty well! In the other two we played with ratios in composition, where we would only draw a certain percentage of the model filling a certain percentage of the background.

This was interesting for me: we had to design and simplify the figure. I had mixed results, but here are the two best.

For these drawings, we had to fragment the figure, zooming in to crop the composition in some unusual way. I played with line and value, taking advantage of these exercises to explore the skin folds and muscle contours of Murray’s form.