One of my favorite things about Cogswell’s life drawing sessions are the short poses. At Cogswell, five minutes is considered a long pose. The warm-ups are ten-second poses. Ten seconds. I’ve never been at another drawing session that does it this way, but it’s great. When the models know they won’t have to hold a pose for very long, they all seem much more willing to give us more difficult poses. And with less time, our pencils get looser, and our drawings get better.

That’s the idea, at least. It doesn’t happen that way all the time, and sometimes it makes me feel utterly exhausted to draw that fast for three hours straight. But more often than not I get some real gems out of these sessions, and even when I don’t, it’s more fun this way.

Some of my favorites from my last two sessions:

New painting, acrylic on canvas panel, 11″x14″.

I’m doing a bit of a fun experiment. For the last couple paintings, I’ve been shooting timelapse photos of my painting sessions, with the intention of being able to show the entire process of how I make a painting. Also so that I might look back at what I did and learn from it.

This one here is the first painting where I’ve recorded the entire process from beginning to end (I have footage for other paintings, but they all start at some point in the middle).

So hopefully I’ll be posting a timelapse video of this painting soon, provided the footage didn’t come out terrible!

Our film got a nice write-up in the Mercury News last week. The full article is online at the Mercury News website.

The last several posts are the result of a new system of warm-up exercises, which I shamefully stole from my fellow artist Geoffrey Stone. It’s very simple. First you start with a list. Fill it with all manner of drawing exercises. Assign each one a number, one through however many you have. Then, when it’s time for your warm-up exercise, take your list, look over it very carefully, and roll the dice.

Whatever the dice say, that’s your exercise. Now go do it.

I love this system. For me, the worst part of having lists like these is actually picking one. Making a decision always feels like such an investment, like there are so many choices, I’d better have a good reason for picking this one over the others. Most of the time I end up not doing any of them. But now that’s not a problem. The dice make my decision for me.

My list is below, for anyone who’s curious. (Extra nerdy detail: some of these also have secondary rolls from other lists, and one of them even requires me to roll again from the same list. Yes I do enjoy this a little too much.)

1 – SKETCH OUTDOORS FROM LIFE
2 – NOIR SKETCHES
3 – COSTUME REFERENCE
4 – FIGURE SKETCHES FROM REFERENCE
5 – FIGURE SKETCHES FROM MY HEAD
6 – SELF-PORTRAIT
7 – COLOR SCHEMES
8 – SONG SKETCHES
9 – FAN ART
10 – ARTIST STUDIES
11 – AMBER’S CHOICE
12 – PIXEL ART FREE SKETCH

Drawn first in ink with a brush pen, then scanned into Photoshop where I added several variations of color.