This week I did really tried to connect my forms. Mattesi observes that Michelangelo had a great ability to draw anatomy as groups of muscles and bones that harmonized one with another. Many artists draw individual muscles and structures great but fail to see them as a whole and how they relate one to another. By drawing through the subject I was able to better connect my structures and feel more rythym in my drawings.
Another great help was to look for the "D" shapes. Mattesi suggest as an excercise to cut out a D-shaped piece of paper and place it on your drawing surface. He instructs you to then draw the figure around the D. This excericise to help you find the most major force in the pose. While I did not use the cut paper, I did begin every drawing today with the letter D and was amazed at how quickly I was able to make sense of the gesture on my paper.
Today I was very excited to return to the studio and practice more of what I've learned from Mattesi. I struggled the first little while as I was more focused on doing a good drawing than I was applying his principles, but after being humbled I returned to what I had learned last week about drawing in four point perspective and this is my result. Not too exaggerated, but I really liked the twisting/zigzag movement from her left foot all the way through her neck. I feel more force in this than all my other gestures from the day.This second drawing I was trying to apply what Mattesi teaches about finding form. He talks about moving away from the edge of the figure and try to re-mold the figure on your paper as it moves through space. This "re-molding" is a principle that really changed my approach today. I'm not too happy about how messy this drawing turned out, but between the foreshortening and contour modeling I felt I somewhat achieved what I was going for.
Just recently a monster has awaken in me and I've taken it upon myself to feed it. It's amazing how one book can change you're entire perspective and provide so much personal drive to get better.
The book is Force - Dynamic Life Drawing for Animators by Michael D. Mattesi. His approach is very unique and different from anything I've been taught. Today I began attending an open figure drawing class and here is my most successful drawing from that session. Mattesi talks a lot about using 4 point perspective to make the figure move through space and seem more monumental. I really exaggerated the perspective and foreshortening and made a fair attempt to get my figure to move through space.
So I've gone back to the beginning of Matessi's book and started over. I was getting into chapters about the clothed model and drawing on location, and while interesting I felt I needed to review everything I had read so far. It turns out there were a couple of key concepts I had either overlooked or didn't fully grasp the first time a
round. One was the basic movement of force through the body. I had my own students do a worksheet last week mapping out the directional and applied forces. The assignment was to use color pencils to draw the direction of the force on top of miniature versions of Matessi's drawings. The students did an excellent job and I too gleaned a lot from the exercise.
