Stacy Weitz Minch

These are some quick little sketches of the skull after some Colleen Barry studies I found online. Hers are really nice, of course. Looking at her drawings, you can tell that she has such a solid understanding of what she's looking at as she draws. It's more than just copying. Goals...

These are some really quick copy sketches from plates provided for structure figure drawing. I probably spent no more than 5 minutes on the most complex of them so don't judge ;) I just want to get a good feel for the dimensions and I'm not really all that concerned with perfect accuracy. It seems like I've seen a diagram somewhere that shows a simplified version of all the planes of the head, and I'd like to find and copy that too. Then get back to my model skull and do some quick sketches from it. And finally start trying to sketch the skull from my head from different angles and see how I do, ha. Could be a disaster, but I'm gonna try ;) I forgot to take a picture of my long pose in progress yesterday (I bet you're so sad...). But I'm trying to sort out what I'm hearing about values. So I'm going to try to splat out my thoughts on value organization while they're fresh. And maybe I'll need to refine these thoughts later, but he...

black col-erase pencil and white charcoal on canson mi teintes paper Finally getting around to doing a little sketching of my buddy Charlie the skeleton (my kids thought it was pretty hilarious that I decapitated the poor guy ;). This was probably close to two hours of drawing. Sometimes drawing on toned paper seems to make more sense than white. Maybe I just lose the patience to fill in all the middle value with white. It seems like most the value you see when drawing people is middle value so filling it all in can be a little tedious. I just want to get a better feel for the structural elements of the skull. And I'd like to get to know it well enough that I could draw a proportional skull from several angles out of my head. So here's the first of what I hope to be quite a few sketches :) hoping it will help me be a little more intelligent in my seeing when it comes to drawing portraits from life.

Just a couple little copies for my structure class--I think I'm behind on the homework. Now I should dig out my old human anatomy textbook and try to figure out the names of those muscles (I knew them once... so they should come back quickly, right?). The way the foot (and maybe knee?) are positioned on that left leg seem a little weird to me... don't know if it's the plate or my copying (probably my copying--quite a few distractions around here, and it really wasn't a very good day to begin with). I had a little help from my three year old on the right there ;) 

  I think I've copied seven plates now? I've gotten a little sketchier as I go (and quite a few of these were drawn while driving around town--everywhere here seems to take at least 30 minutes). But I have to say... these shapes are solidifying in my brain a bit as I go along. I think next I may try to do a few from my head and see how that goes. Maybe copy that last one too.           I'm a little befuddled still by the angle of the forms in a lot of these drawings. They look like they would be very arched-back postures to me. But maybe I'm just not comprehending how tilted these things actually are in the body.