Here are a few if the keepers tonight. I’m trying to push myself with my figure drawing, trying to stay cognizant of a few key things when I work:

1. Feel the weight of the figure rather than draw the lines that define it. Howard Pyle once famously said “Don’t paint the sleeve, be the arm.”  This means to be empathetic to weight and tension when drawing and draw how that feels. I know it seems weirdly esoteric, but keeping this in mind helps me a lot when drawing.
2. Design the figure. It’s not enough to simply translate what you see; choose points of interest and give them the love they need to be focal points. I tend to use the pinker parts of the body to create a rhythm running down the figure: Face, nipples/elbows, hands, knees, feet. Because these parts have more capillaries near the surface of the skin, you can throw red in them and they feel right.

15 min pose

15 min pose

10 min pose

5 min pose

20 min, Nupastel on paper

1 min gesture

There are more after the jump!

20min

Ninja of Die Antwoord -Nupastel, about 20mins

10min pose

10min pose

10min pose

5min pose

Last Friday marked the end of the first ever workshop put on by my school, The Art Department. This event was absolutely amazing, and it was a shame it wasn’t better attended because people missed out on a ton of awesome classes, crits and demos. The list of visiting and participating artists is hard to believe: Gary Kelly, Mark English, John English, Brent Watkinson, George Pratt, C.F. Payne, Anita Kunz, Jon Foster, Sterling Hundley, Andrew Jones, and Francis Vallejo.

In the last month I’ve forged personal relationships with some of my heroes and had some amazing one-on-one experiences. I’ll be posting more anecdotes in the future, but I’ll start with a little story about George Pratt.

George's monotype demo. (Photo courtesy of Simon Boxer.)

As you probably know if you follow the man closely or if you’ve ever met him, George is an absolute music fanatic. Not only is he the driving force behind See You In Hell Blind Boy, a documentary about his quest to track down a mysterious bluesman known only as “Blind Boy”, but he’s also a walking encyclopedia of music. Armed with his iPhone, George is like the  tooth fairy of good music; dropping by randomly to sprinkle you with little bits of music. One particular Sunday morning, a big group of student and instructors were having breakfast at a greasy spoon place near the studio. I was sitting next to George and he played some Cat Stevens at his son’s request (Georgie is also a burgeoning music aficionado). I made a quip about “Yusuf Islam” and George’s eyes lit up, sensing a fellow music lover. For the next 15 minutes George and I sat slumped over his iPhone, listening to awesome rough cuts and alternate versions of Cat Stevens songs like a couple of kids pouring over classic issues of Batman.

Later on that week, we got to see just what George is made of when he gave both a monotype and oil painting demos. Let me tell you, this guy is a badass! George is the kind of guy you could hand grocery bad and a broken crayon and in 15 minutes he’d hand you back an amazing work of art. He made two images of WWI doughboys, both dripping with the visceral, energetic mark making that George has come to be known by. If you are a student of the arts and have ever had the opportunity to see a master work first hand, I suggest you seek out the opportunity. I learned so much from just watching George make pictures that would have taken me years to figure out on my own. The whole time he was painting, George dropped hilarious anecdotes, relating to us tales of how he met his heroes and how he himself learned to paint. He is one of those rare people that is both incredibly talented and incredibly sincere… in fact TAD’s roster of instructors is somehow loaded with just such people, which is why I’m so damned excited to be in on it at the ground floor!

This post is inspired by Sarah (@lilluxe on twitter) who dug the Flying Lotus remix of Aphex Twin ( here ) and wanted some more good beat music. These all have enough swagger to scrunch your nose and get your head bobbing.