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Okay, I'll admit that skull reading and phrenology sound a little silly to me. Trying to get a sense of a person from the hollows and grooves on their skull? Not buying it. But I do know that "reading" the skull as an artist is key when it comes to learning how to draw a human head for...
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I recently took a life drawing class and showed my sketches to a friend, who's a super-skilled painter. I was reluctant to share them, but when she looked at my final sketch--in which the model had her hips contrapposto but twisted slightly away from me with one arm across her chest and the other...
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Did you just read that and think, "Wha-wha-what?" Well, when I first saw the phrase--which was originally applied to the sculptures of Antonio Canova--applied to the work of Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, I had the same reaction. But it is true--there is something inherently contradictory about...
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Hello there, I'll be doing some blogging for Artist Daily about human figure drawing . The plan is to do half of the blogging as written text and half as video episodes where it would be easier to demonstrate the concepts I would like to talk about. But perhaps it is a good idea to introduce myself...
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I feel like every time I pick up a pencil to attempt portrait drawing, I am back in elementary school learning the basics of how to draw a face all over again. You know that art argument about whether you need natural talent to learn how to draw? Well, I'm here to tell you it isn't true because...
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Art makes stories come alive. To me, it is as simple as that. And sometimes without art, there is no story-—or, at least, it's not quite as good. This was the case for the great American novel Moby-Dick . It is hard to imagine that Melville's opus was once relatively unknown, but it wasn't...
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It's probably half-endearing (hopefully?) and half-annoying that I think there's no better way to start off the weekend than with art. But you know what I mean! As the fall season gets into full swing, I think we are all coming back around to our art, and for me, nothing sounds more appealing...
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There's something immediately nostalgic about Charles Kanwischer's graphite drawings. When I first saw them I immediately felt like I was looking at an old black and white snapshot. But in a way, his simple drawings are far better than snapshots because in his work you know there's intent...
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Plenty--especially if you are trying to figure out how to draw a person in that chair. Drawing people standing up is waaaaaay more straightforward than puzzling out how to proportion and position a figure sitting down. But to draw people this way opens up a lot of compositional possibilities for an artist...
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When I first saw the work of drawing artist Joan Wadleigh Curran I felt trapped...in a very good way. Curran takes as her subject matter from objects and places that most people would steer away from—dirty trash bags snagged on a chain link fence; twisted and bent barbed wire surrounded by torn...
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There's no shame in your game if you haven't heard of this kind of perspective drawing ...or lack thereof. I kind of pride myself on knowing a good bit about how to draw perspective (although my actual execution of a perspective drawing is usually totally crappy) and I'd never heard of zero...
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This is another complicated charcoal drawing, one done by an artist completing her first level of study at Studio Incamminati. I have shown it in three stages, ranging from the beginning of the drawing process to the end. The light is from the front right, and the subjects include metal and glass objects...
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I'm not a napping kind of person. When I'm up, I'm up and I want to be doing something or on the go. That's usually the kind of body drawing that I'm pulled to as well--muscles torqued, body indicating action, and an underlying sense of movement. That being said, I do recognize and...
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There are subject matters that are fairly easy to take in and those that need more time to understand and a willingness on the part of the viewer to move out of his or her comfort zone. Works that artistically represent intense events--like violence or tragedy--are especially powerful when they merge...
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I don't care what anyone says, color is king. It makes everything better--more appealing and lively. Oftentimes in an artist's drawing practice, a sense of color takes a backseat to the black, white, and gray of charcoal or graphite. But that doesn't necessarily have to be the way it is....