I completed the gesture drawings of different views of the figure sculptures today. This is different than the process I used last summer when working on this project, when I was creating fewer but more fully finished studies of individual views of the sculptures. The advantage to doing these gesture drawings is that the process quickly distinguishes which figure sculptures have the most potential as references. It became very apparent as I worked on these gesture drawings that one sculpture I had was not going to function well as a reference, and another needed a significant change in the pose to be fully effective.
I also had a shift of plans today for the final drawings: I’m changing the game plan to create vertical compositions instead of horizontal ones. At the 36″ x 48″ size I’m working, horizontal compositions would significantly shrink the size of figures. If the scale of the figures is reduced too much, it eliminates my ability to draw with the lithographic tablets and rubbing ink, two drawing tools that I’ve really thrived on in this series. I also know that I hate drawing small; I feel constricted and claustrophobic if I don’t have the room to move around. The difference is that I’ll create vertical compositions that have significantly more figures which will bring on all sorts of new challenges. (the previous drawings only had three figures in each composition) Tomorrow I’ll start working on compositional studies using these gesture drawings as references.
