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| Drawing of a nose by Darren Kingsley with graphite pencil. |
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The fall session at Studio Incamminati has begun, and I am taking classes with
Darren Kingsley. One is in charcoal, and the other in
graphite pencil.
Last year as a new student, I was introduced to doing charcoal drawings in, for example, 60
seconds, five minutes or ten minutes. We
did longer ones as well, but the emphasis early on was capturing the gesture of
the human form, in one or a few straight lines. We moved to mass drawing as the
year progressed, but generally in
quick figure drawings.
Well, imagine my shock when Darren did a demonstration of
what we would be doing in his cast class (copying three-dimensional forms of
human features such as the nose, an eye, and a mouth in two dimensions).
Darren very slowly, and with a very soft touch, established
the approximate height and width of the nose. He then began to establish
the form, finding it with straight lines, which became rounded only after he
had achieved the shape he was looking for in straight lines. Then he began to
put in the shadows. The drawing you see here is not the shadows as he put them
in the first or second day, but the third. He began the shadows very lightly,
using the time to continue to look and and correct the drawing, including
shadow shapes. You might look at
this drawing and think it was close to being done. The form shadows are there,
the cast shadows are there, and the shapes look pretty darn good. But the
reality is that we are going to be spending in the range of twenty ( yes, twenty!) weeks doing a single
drawing of a single feature!
At first, I
have to admit to being a bit overwhelmed by the thought of it. But after the
first three sessions of class we have had, I think I am a convert to Darren's method of
teaching. Although I have been working on my drawing of an eye for six or so hours, I am still
correcting very basic things, such as the height of the cast itself. The eye
was too wide, and that needed to be corrected. There were (and are) lots of
additional corrections to be made as I work my way through it. I will provide
it in whatever state it is in the next blog or two, but the thing I am sure
of is that it will not be correct by that time. The angles will not be
precisely right, nor the values, which will be put in very slowly. It will take the time that Darren has set out to really get the
job done right—not just good—but as close to perfect as each of us can reach
in the time allowed.
But rest
assured, Darren does not recommend doing every cast drawing this way. It is a
teaching technique. It is not an every time thing. (I checked with him to be sure!) In my view this is just another way of teaching us to see
and achieve the proper angles, no matter how small they may be, and to see and
obtain fine distinctions in value.
Both will be critical to us as we draw and paint.
But who would have thought
this was one of the ways we would learn it, especially after the fast paced
drawing we started with!
--Judith