Fantastic model tonight! Turns out (so learned I at the break) that he, too, is an artist who has studied at the Bruges Academy of Art. The only reason that is important is that means he knows intuitively, what makes for an interesting pose (you don’t have to be an artist to know these things, but it does help). So he brought his own props. In this case, a rope (a touw, in Dutch). That allowed him to pull and twist in interesting ways. Here are a few of the three minute gesture drawings. They, in their simplicity, lay the groundwork for the fifteen minute studies which were to come.

The longer fifteen minute figure studies illustrated here are built upon the gestural ones above. You can see some of the internal navigation lines I used to set up the drawing on the left and in the spotlighted one above: the Reilly rhythms, Bridgman’s anatomy, Animé cartoon abstractions. Since those exploratory lines are usually in carbon pencil, they are relatively light. I can go over them with charcoal once I am sure of my placements (sometimes I erase them, sometimes I don’t). But in any case you can see the process and see how the figure is built from the inside-out. The final drawing of the night (on the right), shows where I had enough time to break out the conté crayons. A little light, a little depth and a little passion. I’m happy.