Life Drawing - Lizz in Symmetry

Tuesday Nights, I teach a Life Drawing Workshop at Sony, for the artists and animators to practice their old school drawing techniques.

the Mirrored Image Exercise:

Symmetric 10 minute poses. Our model, Lizz, posed for 10 minutes, then turned 90° or 180°, so we could draw her from the other side for another 10 minutes.

The object of the exercise is to get a sense of the figures dimensionality. Parts of the figure hidden in one pose are revealed in the next. The artists use the first drawing as a size reference, while developing the second drawing.

Keeping the light in the same position helps the artists see the light and shadows change as the model moves. This gives them a chance to indicate how the lighting changes on the same figure. If everything works out, the result is a symmetric image with the same light source.




I sit with the artists and demonstrate each exercise right along side them. Hopefully, learning by osmosis is possible.

10 minute demo drawing done with colored pencil on 50 pound Canson sketch paper, 18" x 24", by Graham Smith.

Sketchbook Jam - Mary Fleener & the Wigbillie's

Mary Fleener & Paul Therio by Graham Smith.

I took my recycled grocery bag sketchbook to the Friday Night Sketchbook Jam, up in Encinitas, California a while back.

Underground comic artist Mary Fleener played with her band the Wigbillie's, while local artists drew them in our sketchbooks - another pretty nice Friday night in Southern California.

Mary Fleener and Paul Therio sang the blues, played the hell outta some old songs, and kept the protest song vibe alive. The rest of us enjoyed their music, painted, created drawings and a good time was had by all. Special thanks to Studio 2nd Street for putting all this together.

Listening to the music gets my pen going, and since it's Friday night, I draw without planning. I just grab whatever is in my bag and start drawing in my homemade recycled brown paper sketchbook.

The drawing at the top of Mary Fleener and Paul Therio was drawn with the skinny end of a Tombo Brush Pen unless I'm mistaken and it's really a Faber-Castell PITT Artists Brush Pen. The drawing of Mary playing, in blue, was created with a plain old Optiflow roller ball pen from Staples. I drew Van playing the mouth harp with black colored pencil from Blick and General's white charcoal pencil. Paul's portrait was drawn with a Caran D'ache woodless graphite pencil 6B. The roller ball pen came out one more time to draw Cindy Lee Berryhill singing and playing her guitar. The recycled sketchbook is about 7 x 10 inches.

Cindy Lee Berryhill

Singer-songwriter, and early anti-folk proponent, Cindy Lee Berryhill opened the night debuting an emotionally wrought, early version of "Beloved Stranger" in a very personal performance, making this a very special night.

Recycled Sketchbooks

I like to make paper sketchbooks from used grocery store bags. Recycling.

Next time you are asked,"Paper or plastic?" The correct answer is paper. Start saving those paper bags. Simply cut the paper handles off and slice the paper bags up to a handy size. I like to use small binder clips to hold all the pages to a piece of cardboard. Making your own sketchbooks is fun, you can make them any size, plus they are free!

Here are the first 2 drawings in this recycled paper sketchbook. I used colored pencil, graphite pencil and white charcoal for these 2 quick drawing of Dawn working on her laptop.

Recycled paper sketchbook, cardboard cover, binder clips hold the whole thing together.