New Model and Portrait Course at de Kunstlinie – 2011

Last Wednesday, 2 November 2011, I went to the first gathering of the Model and Portrait course at de Kunstlinie. The teacher was Iwona just like last year. She started off with a really short introduction of herself and then she gave us enormous papers and… a tiny little pencil.

That was a challenge. To begin with we got nothing to erase with. Later on Iwona gave us regular erasers.

I am up for challenges so I did all I could and that was hard work. I used to love working with pencil when I was a kid. That was how I started with art. I could sit for hours and draw. Time was not an issue and the paper was normally one quarter in size compared to this paper. Now I had two hours to do something useful of this giant paper.

Not only the paper was big, also the model was big, a friendly and voluminous model. Her name is Sonja. She remembered me from the last year. All the others in the group were new.

At some point I started to smear out the lines with my thumb. I had to have more shades to indicate volume in this drawing before I was going to be happy. Maybe I made Sonjas thigh to thin. On the lessons of Iwona the whole model should be drawn so there is no possibility to skip the legs because they are difficult or anything like that.

You may not believe it but I made Sonjas breasts bigger than they were in reality. I discovered it too late to fix it. On the other hand the breasts looked fine like this too and it was just for practice so that is okay I suppose.

As a little extra effect I used the eraser to make the ear ring sparkle. You need to click the image to zoom in to see this.