Figure Unit

It's that time of year again, when I spend a week or so with the AP students drawing and painting the figure.  I love this unit!  I forget how much I enjoy drawing/painting people until I sit down with the kids and draw.

So here's a sampling of my figure studies:

Lesson two.

Double portrait.  Emphasis on contour line using waterbased marker, then value/form emphasis by adding water to the marker lines plus watercolor washes.

Lesson four.

Acrylic washes to lay in values, then worked into with oil pastels.

Lesson two.

Water based marker, contour line drawing, watercolor washes for values/form.

                                                                               

           Lesson three.

Broad washes with watercolors on yupo paper (nice hard polypropylene paper, very smooth finish; leading to real cool effects with the watercolors) laying in lights and darks, then working in the details as needed.  The students came up with some beautiful results on this one.

For lesson one we spent the classtime (about an hour and 15 min) exploring gesture drawings using charcoal and conte crayon; we moved from quick gestural studies to longer poses. 

Finally, just for fun...this picture of Larry, who says hello!

Student Work --- Figure Drawing Unit

We've spent the last few weeks studying the figure in my AP Studio Art class. We started with quick gesture drawings and worked up to longer sessions with the model.  The students spent about 2 hours on these drawings.  I feel like a proud mother showing off their work...I am proud of them!  These kids are the cream of the crop and I'm so pleased with the results of this unit so far. After we finished these drawings,  I set up simple fruit arrangements for acrylic painting studies.  Inspired by blogger Lisa Daria's compositions, we painted fruit for two days.  The sole intention was:

• 
  
  seeing value and developing form
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   color mixing
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  zooming in on the subject matter

The compositions were painted on toned ragboard.  While not 100% visually dynamic, the goals were reached.  I saw the students mixing colors in a broad range of values and hues and the compositions were interesting.  

After studying fruit forms, the students are back to figure work;  my hope being that they'd bring what they'd learned painting fruits to the figure work.  They're painting the figure using acrylics, successfully developing form and good compositions.  So far, so good!  The real plus is the kids are really enjoying the painting process.  The paintings will be posted as soon as they're done.   

Figure Drawing Unit

While teaching my students different approaches to figure drawing, I took some time to draw along with them.  We started with quick gesture studies that led to longer sessions with the models--the students take turns modeling. The model sat for about an hour for this session; the students produced some beautiful works; which I'll post soon.