


It's a cliff if you can't tell from my crappy rendering. I really should do more live sketches of cliffs before I draw imaginary cliffs. There's more to the story later I just got tired shading all this.

There won't be tuesday night long pose for four weeks, but Gesture Drawing session at noon is still going for a bit so I checked it out. It's been ages since I did gestures, I was never very confident with it, especially with a pencil. So today I tried using brush strokes hoping the mess would blur the apparent lack of good lines... We did a bunch of 1 minutes poses and a bunch of 3 minute poses. I was completely exhausted at the end of it because it was so fast and tense.
This is a two-week pose, so I'll be finishing the bottom half next week, taking my sweet time shading things. I already tried to draw as small as it can fit in my scanner, and it still doesn't fit!
I bought better tools this week. A charcoal pencil PITMO B and a jar of graphite powder which came just in time for this week's sketch. It would have taken me more than 3 hours if I draw this with pencil, powder is the way to go for big coverages. And the combo of charcoal pencil and powder leave my fingers relatively clean, I no longer have to leave a sketch session looking like a Dickensian coal mine worker.
I used charcoal pencil this time, but later found out it wasn't a very good brand, it was a bit grainy. Plus shading the big area of the back took a looong time with my little pencil tip. I could have finished drawing the whole body in 3 hours if I wasn't painstakingly scratching away with my little pencil. Must acquire better tool next time.

I haven't been to SketchCrawls for such a long time, so I decided to go along with this one. Apart from enduring the horrifying smell of Bart, the temperamental weather and windiness of downtown SF, and the dispiriting long line of ferry building women's bathroom, my sketches turned out not too badly. Or so my engineering husband tells me. Either that's the truth or he's trying to make up for snoring all night last night.