Dynamic Catwalk Pose and Rendering Fabric

Last Friday, we had Brenda again for our instructor which was good. While she was more lenient than C, she was less critical than M. I managed to produce some good drawings. Not perfect, but not bad either.

For the morning class, she brought in a model so we could draw a dynamic catwalk pose. Although the model was on the thin side, she wasn't exactly a model and needed a bit of coaching on how to strike a pose. Her second pose wasn't a catwalk pose though as she did a reclining pose. We had to draw her and render the clothes she was wearing. I was glad that she wore one one of those fitted bodice dress on top and triangular-handkerchief type below (sorry, I haven't learned the language of clothes so I can't really give an accurate description). The dress was red and had swirling white patterns so it really gave a great visual effect. The tricky part was drawing it in ink. I didn't want to use the red ink (I did have red ochre gouache but I didn't want to use gouache)that Brenda provided since I didn't want the red color to overwhelm the drawing. Instead, I used purple. Purple for the dress and black for the outline of the figure.



As usual, using black to outline the figure was tricky. The line tended to become think. I did manage to control a bit of the thickness with the sable bristled brush I just bought that day before I went to class. I must say the brush was much, much better than the brush the school asked us to buy. It was a tad bit more expensive but worked better.

In the afternoon, we had Jfry to model for us. We were supposed to render heavy clothing on the body but since it was 31 degrees outside, he didn't come in wearing thick clothing. He wore a black netting type of shirt which clung to his upper torso. I didn't mind that he had a nice bod. What I didn't like was that it was hell to draw. We were given the option of using charcoal, gouache, ink, and pastel. I chose coloured pencil to give me more control. The outcome was good but I still had to work on how to show the folds and the lines.

I really appreciated the way Brenda allowed us longer periods to draw. I was able to really focus and correct my drawings. While she did make comments occasionally, it was never intrusive and she did apologize. Sure will miss her.