Past Present Future

Some new concepts

Norman Walk Cycle

Ollie the Ogre

2 for 1

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 around. 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.
The body is not just connected through anatomy, but also through force. The flow or movement of force through the body it what gives a drawing rhythm and balance. Force can be expressed with curved and straight lines. How much curve and whether the line is convex or concave describes life forces in a 2D medium. To apply these principles I began each drawing today by strictly drawing only lines that described the movement of force. This was a new way of thinking about gestures and it proved to be successful.

Figure "D"

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.