Back from hiatus—posting my work from 2019

I decided at the beginning of 2019 to stop posting my work immediately after drawing it. There's something about it being seen too soon after finishing that I don't like. I never intended to wait a full year to post these, but somehow that's what happened. I must say though, it really did feel freeing to be drawing only for myself again.

After they've sat for a while—a few months maybe—it no longer feels like putting your freshest work up for inspection, you've drawn a bunch more stuff since then and that's what still feels too fresh to show. This is now older stuff.

In 2018 I decided I needed to work mostly on my drawing, especially figures, before getting back to the painting. The issues I was having were drawing issues. So I kept drawing.

I work best in pencil on regular old paper. It used to be typing paper back in the 70's and 80's, now that's hard to find and instead we have copier paper, which is much thicker and toothier. I do sort of miss the slick surface of the bond paper, but I also like the thicker feel of today's copier paper. And it comes in 11 x 14, a size I really love to work on, though most of my practice sketching is done on good old 8.5 x 11, standard typing bond size.

I don't know why it took me until July to start drawing last year. I guess I had other stuff going on. And I didn't get a lot done, for the most part just a few drawings a week, but I did keep on going that way for most of the remainder of the year. I'll start posting, probably once a week, in batches like this.

At this point I was just trying to get the feel for drawing figures entirely from imagination again. What I was trying to do is get a dynamic pose down first, a good gesture, and then develop it into a full figure drawing.  Sometimes I'd start with the stick figures like you see up at the top and draw cylinders and blocks around them to manikinize them into figures. Sometimes I skipped the stick men. Just playing around.

Sometimes I thought about the Vilppu method. This is not really a good representation of it. I shouldn't have smirched his name by writing it here, but I wanted to remind myself that's what I was thinking about when I did these. I always try to write little reminders to myself or I won't remember anything about how I did them.

This is gonna be fun! All of these were photographed on the same day, though drawn over a period of a week or so.

See ya next week!