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| 11/20/20 Katlyn, 10-min. poses |
Aside from sketching on location (both with my Urban
Sketchers group and by myself wherever I want to go), the sketching-related thing
I miss most during the pandemic is life drawing. Real life drawing, as in
seeing the model in the same room, three-dimensionally, from life. From
the beginning, “life” drawing on Zoom was an oxymoron: How
can it be from “life” if it is on my laptop screen? But like everything related
to our COVID lifestyle, I started getting used to it. It’s the new normal.
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| 11/20/20 5-min. poses |
And yet it’s not normal at all. It isn’t “life” at all – it’s a flat screen showing a jaggy, often poorly lighted image of a model trying to do his or her best under the circumstances.
When the pandemic first began, I quit doing yoga and didn’t start up again for four months. Boy, did I regret that – nothing disappears so quickly as flexibility if you stop stretching in ways you used to regularly for 10 years (I’m practicing yoga more than ever now, and my flexibility is almost back to where it was before I quit, thankfully). In the same way, I don’t want to stop practicing life drawing because it will be much harder when I eventually go back. And life drawing is especially welcome during these wet, cold months when sketching outdoors is difficult or impossible.
It sure is frustrating, though.
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| 11/20/20 10-min. poses |
And yet, I will bet that, when you finally go back to live life drawing, you will find that you have picked up new skills. For example, you really got the silhouette shapes of these poses, particularly in the second group! That’s something which I think is harder to learn when you are seeing the model in 3D space...
ReplyDeleteI hope I'm still learning! And good point about some things being harder to see in 3-D. Foreshortening is definitely easier to see and draw on my flat screen!
DeleteI really miss my life drawing group too. I've been brushing up on my anatomy, hoping the theory will connect with practice once we start up again.
ReplyDeleteYou are capturing a lot of nice gestural feeling, there, even though the model is remote.
ReplyDeleteThank you! Anatomy study is useful, but there are lots of life-drawing opportunities on Zoom now! It's a strange irony of the pandemic -- while many opportunities have disappeared, others have flourished.
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