Wednesday Poses

Wednesday Poser
20" x 12"
Digital Print from original life drawing

Rough Sketch

Rough Sketch
Conté pencil on white paper

Upside-down again

Iglesia

Iglesia San Jose
20" x 16"
Digital print from original oil painting

Iglesia San Jose is located in Los Cerrillos, New Mexico, a small village 30 minutes southwest of Santa Fe, that used to be a thriving town of miners with 21 saloons and four hotels. Now it's a semi-ghost town with a small residential population and a dusty, barely-open bar named Mary's Bar. And a Catholic church, Iglesia San Jose (St. Joseph’s Church).

Several movies have been filmed in Los Cerrillos (The Small Hills), including Young Guns and Vampires. 

Poster version

Pillowed Face

Pillowed Face

Spikey Hair and Earrings

Spikey Hair and Earrings
Charcoal on newsprint

Strands of Hair

Stray Strands of Hair
20 x 16
Digital print from original charcoal drawing

Toppled Stool

Toppled Stool
Digital print from original charcoal drawing on white paper

In the Zone

In the Zone
Digital print from original charcoal on newsprint life drawing

In the zone. The nude model zone. Not me. Her. 

Fish Out of Water

A Fish Out of Water
24" x 30"
Digital print on aluminum

I stumbled across a black & white ink drawing that I had done years ago and decided to add color and turn it into a metal print. This was before I started attending regular life drawing sessions, therefore the figure isn't very realistic. Some might say it’s cartoonish. I prefer to call it Graphic Surrealism. That’s because cartoons are inexpensive, but Graphic Surrealism is very expensive. Especially on aluminum.

Storm Vision

Storm Vision
18 x 16
Digital print on aluminum from original ink wash, white chalk, and colored pencil on mat board

The contrast between the rough texture of the original rendering and the final version on high-gloss aluminum is going to be interesting. Maybe just to me.

Pig Tails

Pig Tails or Dog Ears
12" x 12"

I don't know if this hair-do should be categorized as pig tails or dog ears, but either way it complements a nice pose.

Strands of Hair

Another back pose with interesting hair. 

Cerrito Blanco

Cerrito Blanco
Metalprint (aluminum)

After a sketching trip to the village of Abiquiu I made an etching based on one of my charcoal sketches. After taking the etching through several phases, I scanned the most recent version and made an 18" x 22" digital version to be printed on aluminum.

Wine and Cigars in Abiquiu

Doug Coffin, wine, and Romeo y Julietta in Abiquiu
Digital print, 18 x 12 inches, on high-gloss aluminum, black wedge frame

To celebrate my birthday Robin and I recently spent the day in Abiquiu, a village just an hour north of Santa Fe, former home of Abiquiu's most famous resident, Georgia O’Keeffe, and current home of other awesome artists. After doing some sketching in the area and sharing a Monk’s Ale with Robin at Bode’s General Store, we enjoyed a birthday dinner at the Abiquiu Inn with artist friends Teresa Toole and Joe Hall. After dinner we went to artist Doug Coffin’s house for dessert, champagne, wine, and fine cigars. Robin and Teresa passed on the cigars while I discovered that more than half a cigar is more than I can handle. But, more to the point, it was an amazingly beautiful and satisfying day of geezerness celebration. And it inspired me to move on to some projects I’ve been thinking about. One of those projects was to make an etching of a charcoal drawing I had done recently of Doug in his studio. After taking the etching through several stages (soft ground, then a couple of stages of dry point) I scanned the printed proof, then created a digital print, shown above. Nothing says “artist” like high-gloss aluminum. But maybe that’s just me. 

Black Wrist Band

Black Wrist Band

After you’ve named so many poses things like “Reclining Woman,” “Seated Nude,” and “Kneeling Model,” it gets harder and harder to name drawings something descriptive. I mean it’s not like I can use names such as “Woman in Plaid Shirt,” or “Model in Blue Dress.” The Wednesday night model was thoughtful enough to wear a black wrist band. Thank you!

Mystical

St. Patrick’s Day

Last Tuesday night’s drawing group happened to fall on St. Patrick’s Day which also happened to be my birthday. Although the model wasn’t Irish, she did remind me of how St. Patrick was accused of seducing money from wealthy women for his church. And, coincidently or not, there were absolutely no snakes anywhere to be seen during the three hours of poses. Freakin’ mystical!

Hands

Hands of a Model
Charcoal on newsprint

After drawing the model for over two hours in various poses, with varying degrees of inaccuracy, I spent the last part of the last pose just drawing the model’s hands. Looks just like him, I think.

Waiting for a Table

Waiting for a Table at Harry’s Roadhouse
Metal print (aluminum)
14 x 11

Woman on a Pillow

Woman on a Pillow
Charcoal on newsprint

Some of our best models are really good at making a pose difficult to draw. You get used to seeing (and drawing) a head on top of a body with arms and legs in pretty much the usual places. Then all of sudden the model does something like this and nothing looks familiar. But these unusual poses sometimes turn out better than the more ordinary poses, probably because they force you to concentrate more on the relationships between shapes and lines. This might be another one to add to my etching series of life models.

Missing Stool

Missing Stool
Charcoal on newsprint

I’m just now getting a chance to scan some drawings from a couple of weeks ago. I think her right foot was elevated on a stool that I didn’t have time to draw. Or maybe I just lost touch with visual reality and totally failed in the drawing apartment. That happens a lot, but for now I’ll go with the missing stool version.

Waiting for a Table

I don’t sketch as often as I should when I’m out and about. But on this particular night (years ago) we took an out-of-town guest to Harry’s Roadhouse for dinner. The place is very popular, both for food and Santa Fe atmosphere. Which also means lots of people go there and at peak hours and you might have to wait for a table, especially in the summertime. I had been encouraging our guest to draw, so I took a sketchpad and while we were waiting for a table I made a quick sketch of Robin in her table-waiting pose. Skip forward about 10 years and when I ran across a scan of the sketch on my iMac I decided it would make a good etching project that I could keep loose and experiment with in various stages. The version above went from sketch to soft ground etching, then to a small amount of dry point etching,  then to digital print. 

In the next step, below, I added more tone and digital texture to the background, and also lightened some areas of tone to create highlight areas.