Four Models...

 

Muse #5 has been photographed and is currently on the sketching phase. As you can see above, my sister was kind enough to pose for me, and I have to say she looked beautiful and was a really good model! (posing is easier said than done). Thank you Viviana!!!!
I captured lots of good reference pictures that I may be using in the future, including the one here, which was one of the candidates for the painting but didn't make it to the "final round."

You may also be wondering what kind of muses are in picture at the bottom. Well, I also had a couple of other models that decided to go on the spotlight that night. My father, as well as Yogi (white maltese) and Brandy (black Portuguese water dog who has now been with us for the past 5 months!).

Yes, we are a very photogenic family ;)

Self Portrait at 27

 
This is the final assignment of the class. We had to draw ourselves showing how we used some of the muscle groups of the face. I think this was incredibly successful and I am sooo happy with myself that I cannot wait to try my new skills with paint!

If you are in the market for a portrait, I am accepting commissions! If you want something just like this, head and shoulders with charcoal, there is a flat rate of $650 per face. Write me a message if you would like more information! I especially recommend getting some pointers before taking the picture, since not every photograph will make a successful drawing/painting.

L'écorché by Jean-Antoine Houdon

This was the second to last drawing of my class. The figure was done with graphite and the background with charcoal. It looks pretty scary or perhaps like something that should belong in a medical school. Well, let me tell you that in order to understand and be able to depict the human body successfully, one needs to understand its structure. Artists have been studying anatomy for hundreds of years, some of them even dissected corpses (including Da Vinci, Gericault among many others!).
This particular piece was done by Houdon as a study for his John the Baptist sculpture and eventually became more famous than the final product.

Unfortunately, much of this knowledge is no longer taught in art schools these days, but I am fortunate to have one of the few professors in America who has the information and is willing to share it with his students (a highly unusual combination). Once again, I am referring to the one and only David Y. Chang.

Professor Chang gave us a lecture on morphology and taught us all the bones and muscles of the head. It was freaking amazing!!! I now know things like the zygomatic arch, squama, the great wing of sphenoid, condyle, levator labii superioris, orbicularis oris, buccinator, depressor septi, etc. I really hope he decides to teach that figure drawing class.

Apples and Honey

Just a quick study with pastel that I did to get some color in my life after all that charcoal/graphite activity...

"Apples and Honey"
9"x12"
Available for Sale Here

Classical Drawing Report

 

 

 

 

I feel incredibly happy and at the same time very nostalgic from having finished my classical drawing class. It was a lot of work, but I also miss the camaraderie and the environment that develops when you put several artists together. My professor David Y. Chang was able to top himself (NOT an easy task) by giving us a morphology lesson as well as bringing old books to exemplify some of this teachings. One of them was Luca Pacioli's "De Divina Proportione" where Leonardo Da Vinci illustrated complex geometric shapes with silverpoint, a medium that cannot be erased. This demonstrated to the world how confident he was about his skills.

Here are some of the drawings I produced during the class. Please note they are not necessarily finished, since we had limited time to work on them in the classroom. From top to bottom:

Sphere Study (from imagination)
The Silver Cup after Chardin
Geometric Shapes study
Fruit, metal and glass still life
La Jeune Femme study

These were all done either with graphite or charcoal. I will post some more of my drawings soon...

A little French in your drawing?

In case you didn't know, the French were instrumental in the development of drawing and painting in the world. The Palais des Études of the École Nationale Superieur des Beaux-Arts also known as the French Academy or Beaux Arts proved to be the preferred source of great art for kings and emperors alike. It is also the origin of the "pedigree" of great american artists like Thomas Eakins, Robert Beverly Hale, Norman Rockwell, Daniel E. Greene among many others. Pictured above is the writer of this blog in the courtyard of the school in Paris back in 2008.

If you do your research, you will find most great contemporary figurative painters are somehow connected to this great institution, not necessarily because they attended that school, but perhaps their professor, or the professor of their professor went there. Hopefully one day somebody will be researching me and finding that I too, was connected to this school ;)

Well, my homework for this week is to draw one of the most famous faces in art, studied by thousands of students throughout the world. Most people don't know the face belongs to the death mask of a lady that was found drowned in the Seine River. No one ever claimed her, but she became a legend because of her beauty and pleasant expression: "La Jeune Femme." 

For now I am only sharing the struggle of just having to draw her, but I will report my process soon...

 

Classical Drawing & Wisdom from my Parents...

Like my parents always insist, if one sets out to do something, one should work to become the best at it. Art, like most other things in life, is like math, if you don't know the basics you can't really get better at it. That is why I decided to take a classical drawing class again. I took classical drawing more or less six years ago, but since then, my professor restructured it to cover topics I never learned. It was the hardest art course of my degree and I had always dreaded the thought of doing it again.

Guess what? It turns out it is one of the best decisions I have ever taken. I am soooo happy with the new found knowledge about composition, veiling, the golden mean, among lots of other cool stuff. I am confident that I will become a much better painting because of this course. I can't wait to start trying out my new skills with paint!

Above is one of the master studies I worked on for "home studio."  The original is by Da Vinci, and although I am not there yet, I am definitely closer than I was six years ago when I tried it last. This time I actually enjoyed the exercise!!! Who would have thought??? (Back then it was mere torture).

I leave you with another bit of wisdom from my dad... "You can't learn how to swim by reading a book, you just have to throw yourself in the water" and that is exactly what I'm trying to do, figuratively, of course.

P.S. The study is not done, I mostly worked on working the value right on the shadows. I still have to work on the transition from light to dark and the lights :)