I went to Sunday night open figure drawing tonight. That makes it, what? Five or six consecutive weeks of life drawing. Tonight was a good night for more than one reason.

First, the models were great. Yes, models, plural. We had two, a male and a female. In my first draft of this posting I called them a "couple", but there are connotations to that term that might not be applicable here. I don't know and don't really care, but didn't want to misrepresent anything one way or the other. Anyway, the male model was middle-aged, older than me I'd guess (unless he's had an awfully hard life) but it's hard to gauge exactly. I'd put him at somewhere between 45 and 60, thought I'm admittedly not very good at guessing ages. The female model was college-aged, probably twenty or twenty-one.

They made a nice contrast. She had a very soft body, pale skin, and a very innocent look; he had a face and body that showed the benefit of many years experience. Yet, they worked beautifully together; they obviously had a rapport, whatever their personal relationship might be, and were comfortable working with each other. The only bad part about tonight was that I seem to have picked the worst spot in the house. With the exception of a couple of the gesture poses, I had a rather poor viewing angle for most of the night. I didn't have a frontal view of the female model even once after the gestures, and only once for the male model. Now, the odd angles were good for me, no doubt, and I enjoyed myself immensely, but I would have liked one or two of the poses to be more straightforward from where I was drawing. Thankfully, they're going to be coming back in a month.

The second reason why it was a good night was because I had a few fleeting moments where I felt like I knew what I was doing. They didn't last long, and they didn't stick around long enough to guarantee good drawings, but they did give me hope and made me feel, for the first time, like I was making progress. It probably sounds stupid, but to draw a line and have it be exactly what you intended to draw - a line that exactly captures the shape you are looking at - is truly sublime, especially when you generally struggle for even an approximation. It only happened a couple of times tonight, but If I keep attending and keep drawing (and sculpting, of course, but that's a given), I have this strange feeling that I might actually learn to draw someday.

Last week I said I might post some drawings. I'm hesitant to do so because, for the most part, my drawings are teh suck. But, what the hell, I'll throw a few up as long as you promise not to laugh.

These are all on 9"x12" sketch paper using colored lead imported from Japan in a mechanical pencil. I did some larger pieces in graphite and charcoal as well, but I have no good way to scan those. As a sculptor, you'll see that I focus on line and form and generally don't do much in the way of shading. I guess I should, but, oh, well... doesn't interest me right now. Someday I'll learn to paint and to draw for drawing's sake, but for now, I'm interested in drawing for sculpting's sake.

Here's one drawing from last week. The model was a middle-aged woman who is a cancer survivor and has just a great outlook on life. It's not a great drawing, but it was a tough angle and I feel like I did a respectable job given how tough it was.

There were several drawings from tonight that I felt moderately good about, though they don't look as good scanned as they did to me earlier in the evening. Not that they were great even then, but they do show noticeable improvement. Here's a five-minute sketch of two models, a first for me (that it was two models, not that it was five minutes long). Sorry for the bad scan - I couldn't get a good scan of this one for some reason.

This next one didn't scan very well either - I think it's something to do with the spiral binding on the sketchbook. I was actually quite proud of myself on this one - the angle was tough (for me) and it's actually recognizable as the model. It's not an exact likeness by any stretch of the imagination but if you saw the model and then this sketch, you'd likely go, "yeah, that's her", or at least, "that could be her", which is a big deal for me. This was actually a pose with both models, but they were not touching, and I did two separate drawings instead of a single one because I misjudged the scale and didn't leave enough room on the paper for both. The drawing of the male model was not worth posting, unfortunately.

The male model was behind her on this one. All I could see was part of one leg and one arm, and a bit of shoulder, so I didn't bother drawing him. I actually drew her tattoo on this one, which I don't usually do, but I spent a lot of time looking at her back tonight, and although she was a lovely looking young woman, there was not a lot of detail in her back to draw due to the combination of strong lighting and pale skin. She has soft features that would require more subtlety to capture than I'm capable of at this point... so I worked the tattoo into a few of the sketches. And for the record, her right arm was not really that wide. In fact, I drew her as wider than she really is in most of my drawings. That's actually unusual for me... I usually draw people skinnier than they are in real life. Anyway... I had just erased the top line of her leg with the intention of re-drawing it when the timer signaled an end to the pose.

This was the only drawing I did of both models that I'm comfortable posting. The others are even worse. You'll notice that I was looking at the back of the female model again, but at least I had the front of the guy for this one. The stick he's holding was also being held by her, I just never got around to drawing that part of the stick. After break, her position changed a bit, so I ended up basically re-drawing her, and the stick just wasn't a big concern.

In real life, he also didn't like he was about to smack the living shit out of her, though the size difference is actually pretty close to reality. He wasn't particularly large, but she was a rather petite girl. Standing up, I don't think she came up to my armpit, though at 6'3" I'm a little on the tall side.