Building Up to the Essence

2/27/14 Diamine Chocolate Brown ink, Sailor pen, Canson mixed
media paper (15-min. pose)

The short-pose sessions of Gage’s life drawing open studio consist of one-to-20 minute poses, moving from shorter to longer during the three-hour session. Sometimes I want to hurry through the poses of five minutes or less because they feel like a waste of time. Heck, I can catch people working on their laptops staying still for more than five minutes at a time! Let’s get to the longer poses that only professional models can hold!

I feel that way, but I also understand the value of warming up with very short poses: You are forced to capture the gesture, the pure essence, of the pose, as one instructor put it. If you can tell which foot the model’s weight is on, she said, you’ve captured the essence. If you can get the line of the shoulders and the hips right, you’ve captured the gesture. And all of this is informative and useful for longer poses that you build up to, and then you can focus on shading and details to give the essence form. It’s a concept that works, even when I’m impatient.

2/27/14 Nero pencil (5-min. pose)

Pitt Big Brush Artists Pen (2-min. pose)

2/27/14 Pilot Iroshizuku Asa-gao ink, Sailor pen,
Canson mixed media paper (20-min. pose)

2/27/14 Diamine Chocolate Brown ink, Sailor pen, Canson mixed
media paper (15-min. pose)