Wake Up Kevin!

But the second series has professional models and no Diana Ali.  I’ve been telling people for ages that if there was a Naked Figure Drawing Of The Year program on the telly, I’d be applying to be on. This program is now close enough to NFDAOTY to tempt me.  I’ll be applying to appear on the third series and I seriously believe I wouldn’t appear out of place.

All of which got me thinking about figure drawing, so I’m back to the inktense pencils today. Today’s model is Kevin, making his fourth appearance on this blog.  If I’m to make it onto Drawers Off, I need to be painting men as well as women and my previous goes at Kevin have tended to come out OK.  I also thought this pose would give me a bit of practice at drawing feet.

As my main dark colour I chose bark, and this was the first colour to go down.  After that I just picked whichever colour I fancied at the time – this was all on the fly with no planning.  I can’t remember what order they went down in but I put on some leaf green, bright blue, shiraz and chilli red.  Once this was all down I thought the painting needed some bright highlights so I added sun yellow to some of the upward pointing surfaces.

After painting on the water and leaving the painting to dry, I ended up with something I wasn’t entirely happy with.  The edges of shapes just weren’t distinct enough.  It’s values rather than colours that create edges and the values were too similar in too many places.  So I reached for the indigo and went over all the edges.  In places where two shapes sat next to each other, I had to think carefully about which side of the common edge to put the indigo on.

I don’t mind the painting that resulted from all this and it’s going up for sale.  I really like some of the straight edges around the body.  It has reminded me, though, of two things that I’ve struggled with in these paintings that I need to find solutions to:

– First, I struggle with deep and big shadows on the body.  Big shadows like the one on the bit of the torso that’s closest to the floor.  I tend to make those too dark and monotone.  Maybe I need to create darks for these areas by mixing colours and vary the dominant colour in the mix.  The sort of thing I’d do in watercolour and, to be fair, the sort of thing that’s much easier in watercolour.

– Second, where there are second limbs with only a bit visible (like Kevin’s left knee or left foot), these often feel a bit disconnected from the rest of the body in my paintings.  If those bits of limbs are in shadow, that’s even worse, relating to both of my problems.  I’m less sure about my solution to this but I’m going to try taking a different approach to my initial drawing.  As well as putting down all the visible shapes and edges, I’m going to add some invisible edges, connecting up these pieces of limbs into complete limbs.  So in this case, my original drawing would include the whole of Kevin’s left leg, connecting the foot to the knee and the knee  to the buttock.  I’d even include the line of the top of his left thigh, heading towards the genital area.  Getting these lines in would connect up the whole gesture of the pose and hopefully connect things together better.  Obviously, hidden angels would be rubbed out before applying any colour.  The Daniella Brambilla book on figure drawing takes a gestural approach and might have to be moved up a few places on my wishlist.  19 days to Fathers’ Day, 52 days to my birthday.