Drawing Group

© Ellen Blonder

Here's a two-minute sketch of my friend Barbara from our drawing group today. Although we've met for years, we've all but stopped lately. Feels good to knock off the rustiness and loosen up, like working out after a long period of inactivity. 

Short vs Long Poses

© Ellen Blonder

In yesterday's drawing session, we worked with a model who paused intermittently for a few seconds of stillness(sketches on left) in otherwise constant motion. It made the four-minute poses (sketches on right) feel luxuriously long. Unfortunately, the extra time also makes it way too tempting to tighten up.

Life Drawing This Week

© Ellen Blonder

My daughter Lisa was home for a few days, and we spent one morning at a drawing session. The model completed 61 poses in a three-hour period, with most poses lasting one to four minutes. Here are a couple of four-minute poses. See Lisa's on her blog.

Life Drawing

© Ellen Blonder

© Ellen Blonder

The drawing at the top is a ten-minute sketch that I did months ago; the one at the bottom is a five-minute sketch of a different model from two weeks ago. I just discovered a drawing group nearby, where no pose lasts longer than seven minutes and most are one to five minutes. It feels like an all-out sprint to draw that fast, and a session is three hours long. It's a workout--and I feel out of shape.

Abby

© Ellen Blonder

Here's a sketch I did in my drawing group, of fellow artist and writer Abby Wasserman. She has wonderful angles to draw and big, expressive hands, although not as big as I drew them with only five minutes to sketch.

Handedness

My daughter Lisa (blonderland) and her husband Sean (ohkamp) got into drawing the same thing with either hand, then either foot. Silly, but I had to try it, too. This shows one-minute efforts with the left, then right hand, and thirty-second drawings with the left, then right foot--about as long as my feet could hold a pencil.
Reminds me of a time I had a cast on my drawing hand, and a teacher wouldn't let me off the hook. She insisted that the brain controlled the hand and eye, but the results of our drawings may beg to differ.

Model

© Ellen Blonder

I started doing life drawing again about five years ago, joining a group after many years and a career away from it. This is a long pose that I sketched in pencil.