Last night was not a good drawing night. We all have them, nothing seems to work. I expressed this, and one of my students, who was also having a rough night asked: "What do you do when you have a bad drawing day, How do you work through it?"
I told him that on days like that, I basically attack a pose. I draw with more intensity, I try new things, Heck I figure that if the drawing is going to be garbage, learn something from it. So I switched from pencils to pen, back to pencils, I focused on shapes, then on scribbly lines and tried to pull the image from the crap. In the end I got a couple of decent ones out of it.
Our model was dressed as Legolas from Lord of the Rings and was great. This is a 5 minute drawing and a 10.
None of those reasons are the reason I post the times of my drawings. I post the times so that you can know that these are gesture drawings. These were drawings done in my class. The model will hold a pose for 2 minutes or 5 minutes or whatever, when the timer goes off, the model moves. Gesture drawing is not a warm up, its an end to a means. Doing short poses forces you to think and act in certain ways while drawing. It gets you thinking about story, line of action and silhouette. These are 2 and 5 minute drawings.
