I have been posting figure drawings to my Twitpic feed for over a year. Think it’s time I started posting them here instead! It takes a few more steps (it won’t magically fly from my phone to Twitter anymore), but this is really where they belong.

This was a 20 minute pose on 01/05/2011.  I used my much beloved Pentel pocket brush pen and pencil. Click on the image to see a larger version.

If you read the post below, you may be wondering what happened to the funky style I was talking about.  I’ve since started treating these figure drawing sessions as a place to learn anatomy, lighting, speed in drawing, etc, as opposed to a place to make a piece of expressive art.  They are exercises that reinforce the work I do else where.  I’ve learned that the more I do this, the more certain skills that were very hard at first, become like second nature and I don’t have to think about them anymore.  Like shading.  If you look at the post below, you can tell that I could barely even SEE where the shadows fell on the body.  Now I am able to pick them out without much thought and have started creating a mental database of shadows which gets used in my other work (and I didn’t even have to really try to do that, it just happened! Pretty cool).

Anybody interested in attending figure drawing should check out the Tampa Realistic Artists page. They have a model every Wednesday night at the Old Hyde Park Art Center here in Hyde Park in Tampa, Florida. Only $8 for three hours of poses.