Figures

Figure drawing from life is one of my favorite things to do. It is great when you have a professional model, and time to draw when they are sitting for you, but I don’t have many chances to hire them at this period of my life. So thank God for coffee shops, bars, sides of swimming pools, sometimes willing relatives and other fleeting opportunities. 

When you are drawing people in a Cafe or a bar, they will move more or less constantly, you need to be super quick to capture just the most important relationships, directions and sizes of various features in a figure, before the person shifts, blinks, moves everything around. Those drawings will never be very detailed, but they will capture the moment, the movement, the signature of the person. The more you do it the better you become, the quicker you can express the most crucial things about the pose. It also teaches you to not worry when your model moves, to find your own ways, as a draftsman, to live with impermanence of any view point, how to find quickly what is most important to this drawing.  It is never enough practice, never enough time.  Most often I don’t have the precise portrait, but I have the record of the pose, or the ghost of the face, the memory of that moment.

And when there is no one around to draw you can always draw your hands and feet.