3rd Entry for July 25, 2011

These are some more 5-minute studies, and I believe a 10-minute one at the bottom.
On this blog I have taken for the last year or so to post what I feel are my strong images plus my so-so ones. Total stinkers I do omit, so 10 to25% of the studies I've done get scrapped off the top.

I do that for two reasons. Some are partially good, and I'm more sentimental than ruthless in editing. But I also want to show the context of the working process here; not all work is good, so seeing the poorer ones gives you, I hope, an idea of what goes into drawing with some assurance.

I felt that this night's drawings were uneven. In most of the very short studies, and some of these longer ones, I felt my images conveyed a more dowdy character than C-  was.

The Dr Sketchy's sessions are interesting due to their embrace of burlesque and of amped up characterisation, compared with a regular life drawing session. They are popular with cartoonists and animators, which makes a lot of sense.  C- was definitely playing up many of the stereotypes of Japanese culture -her make-up, the elaborate hairdo and ornaments, fan and kimono. My studies do not convey very well how the silver-metallic Star-Trek mesh fabric of the Kimono played with those conventions.
C- 's poses and props evoked for me images of Ukiyo-e art - which I have great fondness for. But my tendencies are more descriptive than stylising, as Ukiyo-e was. But that imagery was colouring my perception all the same.
I felt though that the drawing I was doing was on the edge of imposing an asian-ness onto the depiction of C-  , or picking out those elements that most conformed to that stereotype.

Running with those cultural signifiers would have been quite appropriate in the context of this drawing session, I think, if it wasn't mean-spirited.  I feel that the middle and bottom images came closer to conveying the person I saw.  In retrospect, I felt that her work was a person (who is Asian in appearance) performing Asian-ness in a slightly cheeky/satiric way.  In a perfect world, my choice would be to show the two levels - the performer and the character performed, but to have the person beneath the performance be clearly represented.

At least as far as `race' is concerned. If I was making stylised icons at all, I'd want them to be really strong, sympathetic and affirmative ones. Funnily, there are other areas where I would be okay with departing from the observed in favour of something stylised or exaggerated. I have always enjoyed Retro pin-up type imagery, Art Deco and Art Nouveau imagery, for example. I would deem it a success if I could stylise a person's image along those lines, though. Ditto for more macabre romantic and industrial/gritty imagery, though the latter I do feel some affinity with.

As a challenge, it would be gratifying to me to be ale at will to Tom of Finland-ise or Vargas-ify people in drawings, as that is not something that springs freely from me. And if the person depicted dug being interpreted in that way, I'd be happy with the result (though I still don't think that's where the heart of my art or my particular voice is.)  Whether I like it or not, my drawings mostly come out looking like my drawings.

And I think a number of these emphasise the more superficial aspects of the spectacle unfolding that night, which didn't please me as much.
And all of this yammering underscores how adding costume and performance can add many levels to what's going on in making figurative imagery. But some basic confidence in drawing people really helps with that process...