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:

I finally made it to figure drawing! These last few months have been busy, to say the least. I’m glad I finally have time again — I’ve missed this.

I don’t often make it to these sessions on time (I get off work at exactly the same time the session begins), so I usually miss the warm-up set. At Cogswell, this set is a furious sprint of 10-second poses, followed by slightly longer 20-second poses, and finally a series of luxuriously long (or so they seem) 1-minute poses.

Anyway, this week I made it on time, and I thought the resulting pages made for a pretty interesting visual progression:

Below are also the best of the rest of the session’s drawings, featuring about an equal dose of brush and watercolor, as I fitfully attempt to capture this model’s unusually stunning poses.

I’ve only just this week discovered the wonderful Cafe Borrone in Menlo Park, which, in addition to having great food and lots of people to sketch, also happens to be located between two independent bookstores — Kepler’s Books & Magazines (for your regular book shopping), and Feldman’s Books (for your rare/used/out-of-print book needs).

Let’s just say I’ll be making this a regular stop during my lunch breaks.

Also, drawings from this week’s Cogswell session. This time, the model brought a couple of musical instruments and actually played while modeling. First a guitar, and then later an alto saxophone:

Figure drawing at Cogswell. For some reason, I insist on painting these little watercolor sketches, even though the longest poses are only five minutes. Halfway through the session, Dave put a light on the model — I don’t know if he was going to anyway, or if he was secretly taking pity on me.

Though, what I really need is a way to instantly dry the page between poses, so that I can start on a new drawing without fear of messing up the previous one!