Milan Art Institute Mastery Program Review: Week 6 Part 1
I’m splitting this week up into two posts since it’s taken me longer to finish this time around.
Drawing Gestures with Model
The goal with gesture drawing is to convey the weight of the body. We start by making a circle for the head and a line for the center axis. Then some lines for the shoulders, hips (where the middle of the body is), and legs.
A common mistake, mentioned in class, is drawing the head too large and the legs too short. So I tried to be really conscious of not making that mistake, purposely focusing on making the legs long enough so the hips are in the middle of the whole body. To help with proportions, we learned a method in class called counting heads. Basically, use the length of the head as a guide to count head lengths along the rest of the body. So if the model is seven heads long, the drawing should correspond to that.
For this practice, we are also focusing on speed and quantity with time spent on a gesture ranging from one to ten minutes.
The intention for this part of the lesson is to use a model. However, for this set of gesture drawings, I used a video from New Master’s Academy on Youtube. I didn’t have a volunteer available to pose at the time, so the Youtube video really came in handy.
Drawing Gestures from Photo
This is another gesture drawing assignment but from a series of photos this time. There are four different sources, spending 20 minutes on each source.
Expressive Statue Drawing
I used charcoal for this assignment. The goal is for the drawing to be partially realistic, partially abstract and to play with different lines and values. The source photo reminded me of the statues at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
