Life Drawing ~ Pretty Ballerinas

Tonight, the ballerina Olivia Gomez modeled at the Center Stage Gallery. The poses in the first image were 2 minutes long. The rest are 5 minute poses.

Life Drawing ~ Yakuza

On April 24th, Jee Teo modeled as a Japanese Yakuza at Center Stage Gallery. The first image is a two minute drawing and the rest are five minute drawings.

 

Dr Sketchy's Sept.'12

Life drawings I made during last month's Dr Sketchy's. The colored pencil drawings on the left are one-minute sketches. The center two were drawn during a 15 minute pose. The rightmost drawing, I had a whole half hour to do. I never know quite what to do with all that time-- so I normally just draw the pose twice. So much to learn! Dr Sketchy's is always my favorite life drawing session. Pretty ladies,  with costumes and without, are just so fun to draw! This model's name is Electro-Cute. During the one-minute poses, she wore a gorgeous black sequin dress, had a long fur draped over her, and wore a stack of ten or so pearl necklaces! (Perhaps you can see the necklaces real lightly in my sketches? They're massed together into a scarf-like clump.) The thing about Dr Sketchy's is that there's never enough time to draw the costume before the model takes it off. Which is good, because it keeps you focused on drawing the figure!

Nabucco - Opera Sketches

The Minnesota Opera has begun it's new opera season, and it's first show is Verdi's "Nabucco"! The story, "...follows the plight of the Jews as they are conquered and exiled from their homeland by King Nebuchadnezzar (Nabucco)."--Minnesota Opera

 I attended the final dress rehearsal with my fellow Black Hatters, to sketch the night away. Watching the opera and sketching at the same time is challenging. Add to that subtitles that must be read and, well... Unfortunately, I missed out on some plot points. But oh, the sights and sounds were simply marvelous! The costumes, sets, and singing are totally enjoyable even without an understanding of the Italian words. Such grand performances just fill my spirit right up with bright, burning goodness.

Below: Abigaille, older daughter of Nabucco

Above: Fenena, Younger daughter of Nabucco, and the High Priest of the Hebrews

I've had the honor of attending several of these dress rehearsals in the past, and I'm still working out the best way of capturing the magnificence of it all in my sketchbook. By nature, I am incredibly slow at everything, including sketching. This time, I tackled the job with my brush pen. First, I drew a rough impression with pencil. Then, I quickly attempted to give the characters more substance and form with ink. The result was far fewer sketches than usual, but all of them are way more complete looking than usual. This has been my first round of opera sketches that I didn't feel the need to work back into afterwards. Yay! 

Opera Sketches ~ The Giver

The Minnesota Opera's production of The Giver was very enveloping. I tried to document a bunch of cool moments in gesture drawings and I couldn't help but jot down a lot of the intriguing dialogue, too. Here they are- cropped and assembled chronologically.

It looks like blogger doesn't allow you to zoom in on this. Sorry about that! You can see all the details if you visit my DeviantArt! :)

I thought this moment was really funny and cute! --In a grey world, the main character starts to see colors here and there. His friend must have thought he was really weird when he reached out to poke her!

Life Drawings

It's been a while since I've attended life drawing sessions aside from Dr. Sketchy's! These are 2 and 5 minute sketches. I like finding gestures, but I struggle with longer poses. I'd rather capture the acting than the details of the form... That says a lot about what I need to learn! I will be attending many life drawing sessions this summer.

Comic Artists at the Opera

Last week, I was invited to the final dress rehearsal of Mary Stuart as performed by the Minnesota Opera at the Ordway theater! I was invited there... to draw! Hosted by Tempo and a group of local comic artists called the Black Hat Collective, it was the first event of it's kind, and undoubtedly not the last. Here are Tempo's blog posts about the event- post #1, post #2, post #3.  I love to see what my fellow Minnesotan comic-ers have done!

The singers were powerful and moving. The whole experience was magnificent and I felt honored to be a special little part of it, hidden away in the audience with my booklight and sketchbook. It was kind of difficult to draw because of the complex costumes (which I love!!), and the fact that they were a bit of a distance away and kept moving. Then again, they couldn't move too much in those heavy gowns, so... excuses, excuses. Here are two ink drawings that I made from a couple of the sketches I did that evening. My heart goes out to those that made it all possible! Thank you!