Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Naked in Red-Blue-Yellow

A lifedrawing sketch from back on May 7th for Drawing 3. The guy, a man in maybe his 60s or 70s, had a very interesting figure with an oddly proportioned back and abdomen. I very much enjoy drawing backs. I think they're one of the top three most beautiful human features aesthetically.

Anyway. I like doing lifedrawing this way. I used a scrap of bright yellow canson mi-teintes pastel paper and covered it with a layer of blue oil pastel, then smeared it with orange and red and brown oil pastels, dotted it, generally made a mess. Then used an exacto knife to scratch out the figure, occasionally smearing what I'd scratched off back into the piece. Went back over it with red oil pastel for the "border" and "ground" and then a dark blue oil pastel for dark shadowed areas. I left it very textural instead of smooshing the pastel down, so some parts are raised. A lot of that dimension got lost when I scanned it. And at some point apparently one of his feet got smooshed out... Oh well!

Still, I had fun.