Sunday 1 August 2010




Course work: In a slight departure from my usual routine, I selected the pose of one of today’s one-minute gestures for both the contour drawing and the line drawing. The gesture drawings remain less than satisfactory. Yesterday’s fairly-successful contour drawing was perhaps due to pure chance, as today’s is far less optimal, despite my having looked to reposition my pen a few times. Today’s line drawing, still using a 3 B pencil on 30 x 46 cm paper,  was fairly satisfactory. Even though I started at the middle, small cumulative errors resulted in my just barely getting the whole figure on the page. This is a frequent problem that I need to work on. I also need to work on hands and feet.

Reading: (Some investigation of the works of Ingres. David, and Degas, not included in my time.)



Whole figure check and log: I have done four pure-line figure drawings for this exercise. These were interesting to do, as they complement my ingoing fast work with gesture, and intermediate-speed work with contour. The major difficulties I encountered were placement on the page, and depiction of hands and feet. Careful repetitive measurement eliminated many sources of error. I would rank the four drawings in order of satisfactoriness as 2, 4, 3, and 1, with 2 and 4 being almost equal. I think that I prefer these in part because of the interesting poses and in part because they seemed to go onto the paper more easily. Any of the four could be further developed as a full tonal drawing, or as a painting: I would rank their suitability for such further development as 1, 4, 2, 3 (though another day might produce a different ranking).



Degas uses line or linear elements extensively in his figure work, ranging from purely linear charcoal sketches through charcoal and pastel on tinted paper to fully developed pastel works, which still exhibit strong linear elements with frequent dark outlining at major tone changes. On the other hand, his oil paintings appear much less linear.

(Three illustrations omitted, owing to copyright concerns)



Ingres as a draftsman was a master of the linear, using tone only sparingly. In his paintings, linear elements seem most often used at tonal changes.


(Three illustrations omitted, owing to copyright concerns)







Strong tonal changes in the works of David were often linear, but I think less so than in the works of Inges and Degas.


(Three illustrations omitted, owing to copyright concerns)







Among other artists, Matisse, Klimt, and Egon Schiele produced many works with strong linear elements.



(Three illustrations omitted, owing to copyright concerns)






Weekly reflections on learning experience: A busy week, with 47 sketches and drawings done for the coursework, in addition to a little personal sketchbook work. I remain dissatisfied with my gesture and contour work, but I know little to do except to persevere.



Total time: 1 hour 34 minutes