Stacy Weitz Minch

Here's a three-hour portrait start from last night at structure class. This model has so much interesting character to his face. I'm trying out some new measuring methods (mentally imposing a grid on the subject), and I think it was really helpful when drawing from this tricky perspective (I was sitting on a drawing horse below the model). Of course I still use all the same angle checking and comparative measurements as well, but when I'm in doubt about the placement of something, dividing it into quarters really helps clear those issues up quickly. 

I was pretty happy with how the likeness developed on this one (is it just me or are bearded men always easier to draw?). I'm also loving the focus on form in this class. We talked quite a bit about form light and highlight and how those things are related (or not so much related). Form is an area that I need some definite guidance, so I'm really glad I'm taking this class.

First night of structure portrait class tonight and it was something of a disaster. I haven't really drawn a portrait from this angle before, and it was throwing me off--my proportions were all over the place. I've been introduced to a new method of measuring where you mentally impose a grid on your subject's face, and then measure within that grid (which I'm trying to wrap my mind around). Harold Speed talks about physically making a grid with cardboard and string to help you find proportions. Maybe that's what I need to do? At any rate, this is only a two-week pose, so I think I may draw a little grid around the photo of this model and see if I can't do a little fixing before class next week. What a mess :P

Two week (6 hour) drawing from structure class. I'm not too happy with the proportions here. I think the head is (still) a little too big. What is it with me and head size? Ha. And the lower body feels maybe a little truncated in comparison with the top half (which may partially be the result of having the top half of the board angled away from my eye on the horse?). Drawing from the horse makes it harder to get the proportions right, so I guess maybe I need to make sure I have a path to back up once in a while, which I didn't this time because I was backed up right in front of a couple other easels (I wanted to be as far back as I could). In any case, this was the last night of this session, so that's that.

3-hour drawing from structure class. I sat on a drawing horse last night because I thought the angle was really nice from there, but not being able to back up made it harder to see the proportions correctly. I think I may finally be starting to capture the gesture here (3 hours feels like a long time to get the gesture down, but approaching it comparatively/structurally on a larger scale still takes me a little longer). Those curly designs on the right are indicating the design of a Raphael painting, illustrating how he uses the human body as an ornamental element of design (and there is potentially a similar movement in this pose).  I've also been encouraged to start doing some master copies from artists who appeared to just have fun with mark making. It seems I am moving forward somewhat mechanically and not allowing myself the freedom to have fun with it (which I would agree with). Marching vs. strutting. Maintaining the accuracy (which is an important element of drawin...

4 week (12 hour) drawing from structure class.  It seems like I was able to get a little bit farther this time than I have in the past so maybe I'm getting more familiar with the approach.  I don't mind this drawing too much, and I think what I like about it is that even though it doesn't look just like the model, the gesture feels like it works together and has a nice rhythm. It would have been nice to have another session or two with this pose so I could refine things more, but I may still fiddle with it some at home. I was trying to add the value in broad planes and then pick the highlights out, which was actually a lot easier to get the feel for with the col-erase than it seems to be with charcoal--just easier to control what goes onto the page in the first place. The face on my drawing got smudged on the way home, and I attempted a quick fix but it's not looking great. The portrait doesn't look much like the model either--with only 12 hours you have to pic...

  Last night's efforts at structure class. I sometimes wonder if I'll ever feel like I know what I'm doing, ha! Maybe not, but at this point my idea is to just make a pass over the whole drawing to smooth and refine things and pay a closer mind to the descriptive quality of the core shadow and contour lines. There's just one more session with this pose, so I'll just see how far I get next week.

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...

  Another session on this drawing. I'm trying to learn how to think more meaningfully about what I put down, instead of relying on naive observation. I'd like to get much better at capturing the rhythms of the gesture from the start too. I have a lot to resolve here, but I think my favorite part of this drawing so far is the knees :) I'd like to spend some more time doing skeletal studies and really get to know it from top to bottom, locking the proportions into my memory. I'll probably start with the skull and draw it over and over until I can do it from memory--that would probably help a lot with my portraits too.

  I turned right around after arriving home from a long car trip and headed to structure class (when what I really wanted to be doing was taking a good long nap). I spent a few minutes doing a really quick sight size gesture to get the pose in my head... but I don't feel like it helped all that much. Just made me more frustrated when my 3-minute drawing was stronger than the one I spent three hours on, ha! Anyway, I keep drawing the heads too big, but I think it might have something to do with the angle I'm viewing my drawing from. I have the easel up pretty high to line up with the model, who is on a fairly tall stand, so the head is on the part of the paper that's farthest from my eye. Or maybe I just like to draw heads too big. Could be. I'm trying to figure out how to use the constellations as landmarks for setting proportion. I guess the hard part is knowing what and where to look for these things. Some models don't have super obvious skeletal landmarks surfaci...

My drawing from structure class, the first of three sessions. I think I'm starting to get a slightly better handle on how to set proportions this way. And I like the feeling of freedom that comes from not measuring quite as much. My sight-size drawings are more proportionally accurate, but drawing this way feels less static and more intuitive. I just need to figure out how to combine the good of both.  I think I can, I think I can :) My goal in this session was just to get a solid block-in down that I'd be able to quickly build on in the next two sessions. We'll see how it goes. We're encouraged to start with long, loose lines and really move around the page to help create a feeling of oneness in the drawing from the beginning. A sculptor was asked how he knew when a sculpture was finished, and he said something like "when every part connects with every other part" (I'm probably totally botching the quote). But every part has to fit into the who...

Another figure flop :P I don't know. It started out alright. I blocked in the upper body really quickly and felt pretty good about the gesture, but spent the rest of the time trying to get those legs to look like they fit with the torso (and didn't spend much time at all on hands/face/feet, so...). Mostly I struggled with the proportions of the legs. I would measure, mark the midpoints and where they should end, then start drawing, and they kept ending up too long somehow. Part of the problem was that there were people seated with sawhorses in front of me, and I'm just not very tall. So a drawing board on a sawhorse in front of me blocks about a third of the figure from my view. Not that I shouldn't be able to figure out how to compensate for that. But I actually couldn't see the whole figure at once, so I'd be peeking around the drawing boards to see the legs, then going back to my drawing board, basically from memory, to draw them in the correct position ...

Here's the conclusion of my 4-week (12-hour) structure drawing. I hope next time I can get the proportions down a little quicker--approaching setting the proportions a different way has been a bit of a learning curve. From last night's critique--my shadow value wasn't reading well, so we flattened that out with a brush (which also made the colerase pencil warmer--so weird, and it's also a learning curve working in a new medium). That softened out the whole drawing, and I went around trying to reestablish shadow boundaries, and look for and emphasize "points of rest," or where the outer forms connect with the inner skeletal structure. At those points there is a transition that helps define the sub-structure.  It's so interesting to see the differences in the approaches of the two different schools. And it's not so much that we don't touch on the same things both places, but that the emphasis is on different facets. The CAS is much more ...

  I wasn't feeling well last night, so I probably wasn't at the top of my game, and somehow it feels like this drawing just gets worse and worse the more I try to fix it, ha! I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting tired of looking at it. Or maybe (definitely ;) it was a bad start, and it's just hard to keep working a bad start. You have that many more problems than you have with a great start. Just one more week with this, so only a few more hours of wrestling this one ;) Anyhow, so I don't forget the night's critique: Colleen gets that feeling of solidity because she's not just drawing what she sees, but what she understands about how the body plane shifts relate to the light source (like a sphere). The lighting likely wasn't so dramatic on those figures you can see on the right of my board. She probably had a similar lighting situation to the drawing we are working on here, but pushed the value (as well as the pose/anatomy) in order to get the effect...

  Week two on this pose. I'm not feeling great about the overall proportions of this drawing (where are those sight size tic marks when I need them? Ha!). And there's some definite mental stretching going on, trying to navigate between what I'm doing here and at the CAS. But I'm really enjoying getting acquainted with the different approach (even though it really feels like I'm floundering at the moment --in both places, really ;). I had some Colleen Barry drawings up next to my board for inspiration. I really love her stuff, and a couple of the teachers there studied with her at the GCA. She tells her students they should be able to lock in the gesture 3D in their heads (by imagining the simple forms of the rib cage and pelvis in relation to each other--gesture is all about the torso at his school), so that they could draw it from any angle, and that she's pretty good at doing it. Also that she holds the end of her pencil at arm's length and really lets it ...

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 wrote a couple of long paragraphs about this and accidentally deleted what I had written! I don't feel like typing it all out again. But long story short, it took some work (and a little help ;) to arrive at the proportions here. The bony landmarks are hard to see on this model for all that thick, broad muscle. And thinking about the three dimensional shapes from the beginning (versus the flat visual impression) is going to take some getting used to.  Oh, and looking at crazy good drawings is really fun, but can also make me wonder why I even try, ha... Maybe I'll copy a couple of these types of things to get this kind of shape/form making into my head. That's probably a good plan.

Just some quick torso plate copying. I'm trying to be as accurate as possible without getting too meticulous about it--I'm getting enough meticulousness on my Bargue copies, so I'm just keeping these loose.  I'm really liking this idea of carrying a line through to the other side of a shape right now. That concept really started making sense on the first night of this structure class when Niki, one of the instructors, quickly demonstrated it on my drawing. It's funny because I swear I've been told to do that many many times before, but it just clicked that day. Probably because he showed me by doing it on my existing drawing. I'm the most visual of learners, and when I saw how it could be implemented on what I had already laid down, it made a lot of sense.  I guess what I like about the draw-through is that it not only makes finding the shape easier and more harmonious/fluid, it gives a feeling of freedom and movement. I have a tendency to get a ...

  6-hour drawing with prismacolor colerase pencil on strathmore 400 paper. This is from the evening structure class I'm taking. I think it's slightly wide overall, but oh well. This was our last night with this model, and I'm hoping I can get a little further with the next pose. Pushing beyond this point and getting into the specifics and subtleties of form is somewhere I need to get comfortable existing. They passed around a book of Russian academic drawings last night, and the way those guys bring out all the little intricacies of form is incredibly beautiful. In this structure class the emphasis is on identifying the major anatomical points (constellation) and sweeping gesture (chief line) of the figure before laying in the contour, whereas the school I attend during the day focuses first on arriving at the gesture by chiseling into the contour from the outside envelope. I like both ways of approaching the drawing, and I think combining them is totally possible. I'm ...

  Here's a 3-hour drawing from another week of structure class. I started over this week so I could work a little bigger--this basically fills an 18x24" sheet of paper. Setting the proportions without the structure of sight size is scary. But learning things like how to divide up the figure into quadrants to find proportion is really a good thing. Even though each figure will be a little different from the standard, it gives a jumping off point for finding the proportions when you're drawing more freestyle.  I like how in this class we start the drawing with a "chief line" or sweeping gesture line. It helps keep the overall thrust of the rhythm in mind while building up the shapes of the figure. I feel like rhythm is something I often struggle to hold onto working sight size. One of the instructors posted a video outlining the steps of the drawing, and he mentioned which landmarks you follow when drawing the chief line, and that was super helpful. For some reason...