I was so, so chagrined when I discovered how much my figure drawing had slumped over the past few years.
One of the things I’m eternally grateful for is that I developed a “figure drawing habit” early on in life. As a young artist, figures were always a weakness of mine. (I liked portraits, couldn’t do figures to save my life and anatomy was B-O-R-I-N-G.) When I first got to college at age 18, I decided to tackle all of that and started taking Life Drawing (also known as figure drawing). It was tough adjusting to live models instead of copying photos at first. (That’s something you’re not told—the big difference between drawing from life vs. photos.) But gradually things got better and I started to like figure drawing.
When I switched to an art school, I loved figure drawing enough that I made sure to take every class available that had anything to do with drawing from models. I also took anatomy classes and loved them. It was wonderful.
Then after art school, I continued taking either community college classes or just finding weekly artist figure drawing groups. This I did for years, off and on. Definitely there were some “off” years, but since I’m “of a certain age” (cough cough), it’s still added up to a lot of years.
With the plague and everything, I haven’t done figure drawing in several years, and it SHOWS. Oh, how I struggled. Some of my recent drawings had parts I liked, but usually the legs were where everything fell apart. This is not permanent; I know with practice and getting “warmed up” the drawings will improve. But still, it was disappointing to say the least.
I know the drawing I posted at the top of the page is not terrible…but, compared to the fluid, gorgeous drawings I see at Watts, I feel ashamed. But, I’m posting this drawing to show the “baseline,” meaning where I’m coming from, my current “level.” Not starting from zero, but with lots of room for improvement. Things I don’t even think are wrong are probably wrong.
Another thing I’m very keen to learn is anatomy. I loved it in art school, but it wasn’t a very popular subject and wasn’t made available for very long. I was lucky to study it for two semesters (I think?). It’s been years since I’ve formally studied anatomy, so I think it’s well past time for a refresher course!
