Buttnekkiddoodles

Just drawing the full figure from life enough these days. So this past Thursday and Friday I put in a little time but still got caught up in the partials.

Steven Assael happened to be at the Palette & Chisel teaching a workshop and sat in on the Friday night life drawing session. I was behind him for a couple of poses and enjoyed watching him draw as I sheet he’d him n the act. Also included are a few head studies acquired in transit.

   

Various inks, fountain pens, Pitt Artist Pens, Seven Seas Tomoe River Paper.

 

A selection of head and hair studies while out drawing in public. A few friends graciously held still for me, but most were captured while drawing in transit, in cafes, airports, and a couple during life drawing sessions. You can tell these were executed on a variety of papers, some in ledger books, some on watercolor paper, Tomoe River Paper, in various journals, but all of the drawings were made using ink and pigmented pens.

Can you ever get bored drawing heads and hairstyles??? Trying to capture as wide a range as I can, the tonsure zoo of hair. Dreads, ponytails, crew cuts, B-52s, pompadoured crowns, flips, dips, cowlicks, comb-overs, straight, Boticelli & Michelangelesque curls, sprays, tinted, two-toned, razor cuts, haze cuts, feathered, bed head, pig-tailed, braided, gathered, bearded, moustachioed, Van Dykes, Imperials, goateed, sideburns, mutton chops, pencil-thins, cornrows, bobs, top-knots, bro-knots, high-n-tight, Mohawks, faux-hawks, French braids, Amish bowel cuts, Page girls, conks……yee-gads!

More head studies from the last dozen years. Most drawings are on ruled paper and in ledger books drawn with a wide array of inks. And, while a couple of the drawings are from my imagination or after photo resources, the majority where drawn from life.

As I have for the last dozen years, I rose early to scoot downtown to the Palette & Chisel for their annual New Year’s Day Life Drawing Marathon. Got in at 7:30 am and left for an early supper at 4 pm. Left this year with a few I liked.

On the way in and warming up with a sketch of a gent sleeping it off.

       

All drawings in this post were drawn in a ruled journal with Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens. While I like the surface and ivory color of the paper, and feel that it has a nice fidelity to the marks, producing a clean edge void of feathered lines, the drying time of the inks is fairly quick so I have next to no time to smudge or dab all but the heaviest and wettest application of ink. Most of the black line work was done with a Pitt Artist Pen with a 1.5 in which produces a strong line with some, though modest, variance of line width. Minimal use was made of a Pelikan M250 Tortoise with a gold B nib that is a dream to draw with but the slight sizing didn’t let me put her thru the gears.

Just a side note, I used to identify the models by their first names sometimes as a way to help catalogue so many drawings, i.e., Pete 1, Pete 2, Mary standing 1, etc. but one of the models who had an unusual name that was also shared by a porn star, started getting harassed by co-workers when one or more of those jackasses discovered the nude drawings of her, downloaded them, and e-mailed them to her colleagues. I had to go back to all those drawings and re-edit and in some cases, delete them from my website.

just another example of the upside/downside to this wonderfully virulent tool.

In need of some life drawing on an unseasonably warm mid December eve, I went to the old haunt, Palette & Chisel.

    

Drawn in a toned Strathmore sketchbook and a lined Paper Blanks journal with Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Brush Pens of various nib sizes.