A bunch of my fellow students at The Academy...or PAFA have decided to form a club of sorts, a painting and drawing club to get together at school and mostly away from school to draw and paint together and help encourage and push each other along. one of the things we all agree about in regards to school is that we are kinda' tired of the usual "model standing around or laying around" poses we get in school. 99.9% of our poses we get are set up by the teachers in class and they are usually not that "pretty' so far. We also don't get many short poses or gesture drawings, so we decided to get together and do a lot of exploring, drawing and painting outside of school so we can start doing more of what we are interested in, developing our skills and eye more.So today dave and Will came over and Will and myself took turns doing relatively short poses, about 90 minutes-2 hrs, sitting so the others could paint, Dave posed for us at school Wednesday, doing the same for Will and myself.
I want to do more studies and quicker paintings as well as the shorter one like the study above of Will that I did today. We also plan on doing plien air paintings and even maybe some sculpture. I can't say how great it is to find a bunch of great friends who really want to get out there or in there and draw and paint. So many people just seem to do work at school and then shut it off when they leave.
Not us, now way, our palettes are always gonna be dirty!
That's a really nice piece. It's been really cool to see the paintings progress. And kudos to you folks for taking it upon yourselves to do your own thing outside of class.
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Very cool, Mike. I love the idea of finding painting partners and going here and there to paint things that aren't really contrived. This is exceptional, as is the self-portrait in the post above. You really are inspiring as you continue to hone and develop your already exceptional skills.
ReplyDeleteMerry Christmas!
Great idea. I recently went back to an open figure drawing class and quickly remembered why I stopped going....boring repeatitive poses. I always remember this quote about figure drawing classes from some artist, "Figure drawing is the practice of drawing bored tired people" Too, true.
ReplyDeleteI think the thing is to get a momentum going as well, which was hard for me this semester as my painting class was 3 hours once a week, so every week was a cold start.
ReplyDeleteAcademies to serve their purpose, but I want to do other things besides them. they are especially useful for the first year or younger students.
I also think having a group of fellow artist into doing art outside of school is great as it's like having a gym partner, if you feel like wussing out, they will force you out of the cave onto the filed to battle with art ;-)
Thanks MT, I have an endless ways to go as an artist. Like a shark you have to keep moving or you die.
ReplyDeleteThe frustrating thing is you never improve as much or as fast as you want.