 
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!
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.
Haven’t been drawing from the model much for some months. Caught the figure above while conducting Urban Sketching workshops in Chicago. I was at the Palette & Chisel and saw Larry Paulsen so I ran upstairs to his figure drawing class and got in an hour of a long pose. Below, a page I’ve kept working on, adding the skulls next to previously drawn poses. I made use of a Pitt Artist Pen Big Brush White and a white grease pencil to help pull some features out of the tangle of over sketching, aka pentimento.
The shoulder area is so important that I wanted to draw x-ray super-imposed bones of that region into the figures’ but the drawing became cluttered enough so I intend to work some of those up at a later date.
The ledger book I’ve been working in, above, has been a real joy and takes the inks beautifully.
