New Figure Drawings from the Male Nude.

Another wonderful night of figure drawing yesterday evening! (In case you're wondering, any time I get to draw from the live model and take a break from being a SAHM is a wonderful night of figure drawing!) We started our session with some shorter poses, 5-10 minutes long. My main goal was to capture the sense of scale of the figure and the dramatic shadows being created by the light - I had to skip the details in most places, although I did define the fingers and torso a bit more. This was vine charcoal on pastel paper, with a little bit of charcoal pencil. (I accidentally folded the paper when putting it away - I hate when that happens!)

This was about 30 minutes of drawing, starting with blocking in the large shapes with vine charcoal then slowly defining the shapes with an eraser and then defining further with charcoal pencil. The face was mostly in shadow, so I did not add a lot of detail to his features. I am pretty happy with the masculine "feel" to this piece. My fellow artists and I talked a lot about the line quality in a drawing of a nude male vs. a nude female - we all tend to be a little more geometric, especially with this model whose muscles are very defined, versus soft and organic when drawing a female model.

We set the final pose up against the white wall of the studio, creating a dramatic effect with the overhead lighting. (This is a view off to the side, I was drawing more towards the middle of the room) We asked the model to keep his jeans on for this pose - it seemed to work well, and we could focus on the area of most interest - the back.

I was working on a soft blue pastel paper, and I was trying to find the right combination of grey pastel, blue pastel and black to define the shadows. At the very end I tried to add some additional highlights with white, but I didn't like the white on the blue paper - however I'd still like to push the value range a little further. I might just have to go darker in the shadows instead of lighter in the highlights.

All in all a great night of drawing!

You can see more of my drawings of the male nude in my Etsy shop.