At my workshops (most recently my winter one, Feb 14 - 17), one of the exercises to which I subject my participants (along with various other forms of torture) is drawing from life. This is guaranteed to be mostly frustrating, since the animals are anything but cooperative models and haven’t the first idea about holding a pose; however, if anything at all gets onto the paper, the exercise can also be very rewarding. This page from my sketchbook came from the afternoon we spent in front of the nursery room for a young cougar - who spent the entire time rolling, leaping, and wrestling with her tug toy - and a large crate containing a small raccoon, who spent the entire time trying every clasp, wire, and other apparatus on the crate.
So why do this? why draw from life, when we’ve already taken hundreds of photographs of similar animals earlier in the day?
My workshops focus on drawing … which really means they focus on seeing. One of the things we discuss is the distortion that various camera lenses introduce; knowing an animal’s anatomy means we can compensate. We also talk about the characteristics of a species - the roundness of a wild cat’s head, the sinuous spine of a cougar, the triangle made by the mask and nose of a fox, how a snow leopard’s tail is as big around as a python. All of this understanding - all of this SEEING - informs an artist and frees her to focus on her own vision, while still ‘getting it right’ - capturing the key elements of cougarness or raccoonness.
And I have found that every artist who paints animals does so because he or she loves animals - loves their beauty, their behavior, their complete otherness. Even though the life drawing is very hard, I never have to persuade my group to spend an hour in silent, loving observation of the animal.
Tags: art workshop, Drawing, life drawing
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March 3rd, 2008 at 5:10 pm
I have to take one of your workshops someday!
March 3rd, 2008 at 7:53 pm
I like your sketches. Could we see more of that on your site. I am teaching an animal sketching class and we will take a field trip to the zoo. Any suggestions on teaching drawing of moving animals. I do it myself but it’s hard to see it from the point of a beginner class?
March 3rd, 2008 at 7:59 pm
Toni - love to have you! I piss and moan about my workshops in advance because they eat up a LOT of my time and energy to plan, plus I worry so about everyone getting her money’s worth, BUT I so enjoy the actual events and meeting each artist and working with all of them that I always come back even when I say I won’t.
Sheryl - hmm, I’ll try to make sure I post some more drawings on a regular basis. When we do life drawing in the workshops I talk about finding the main characteristic shapes of each animal, since we’re not doing lovely finished drawings - the animals are moving, after all. F’rinstance, raccoons have a funny round body shape with the stripy little tail and a triangular face. Also, you can pick a view of the animal and add to it each time the animal moves back into that position (my cougar profile above is an example - I’d add a couple lines each time she showed me her profile for 0.3 seconds…)
March 4th, 2008 at 8:16 am
Toni Grote says; “I have to take one of your workshops someday!
I took Julie’s very first worskshop, back before she figured out what she was doing (just kidding).
I especially liked the pastries that we were served outside in a the tent for breakfast every day and the fabulous barbecue at the end.
Without reservation, the best cooking workshop I’ve ever attended.