Gestures + new basement easel (the Leaner)

 

I found a half-sized pad of rough newsprint, so I did these using some compressed charcoal. I really like using it, though I need to learn to control my shading. The one above was the last, the 5 minute pose (Croquis Cafe) (and I was going by their timing today). It's my favorite, you can see I drew a rough triangular bounding box first and took a few moments to think about what I wanted to exaggerate and how.

And I went back and reworked these a bit after taking the original pics (didn't post all the originals - if it isn't posted it didn't look good):

Oh, almost forgot - here's one I did yesterday (yeah, another one-drawing-day lol) with a chisel point sharpie.

Some pics showing the building of the new easel - it's just a flat frame that leans against the board I clamp to the table.

Got it all glued and screwed up now and it's solid as a rock. Though at first it was a swiveling parallelogram - it could lean one way or the other with the horizontal planks remaining level lol! Had to attach a big rectangular piece of thin masonite to the back with several screws to keep it all squared up. And now I need to take the end of one leg to the belt sander to get it perfectly level. Need to get a pic of the finished thing.

It's made from some old canvas stretcher bars from the art school days I never ended up using.