A super quick little sketch.  It is the year of the water dragon, I’ve read.  Happiness and health to all!

Hi folks!  My friend Lisa and I are doing the 12 Days of Christmas over on our sketchblog My Gecko is Sick.  Alternating posts daily, with Lisa having started.  Come check it out!

My good friend Lisa and I decided to get together and start a sketchblog!

http://mygeckoissick.tumblr.com/

As she prefaced in her own blog: “We decided to make it a little area for sketching improv, where we would each contribute a sketch on the same theme, with each sketch and concept completed in an hour.

Since we both have a fondness for awkward situations and non sequiturs, we decided to embrace that in the name of the blog and our first sketch topic “At the wrong party.” “

Last Saturday night I made it out to a figure drawing event put on by Dr. Sketchy’s where the models dress up in all kinds of outrageously fun costumes.  This evening we had a sexy burlesque clown, and she was a fantastic and tasteful model. I was joined by my lovely artist friends, Lisa and Julia, and Julia’s über-talented boyfriend, Jamie Baker.

Here are a couple 20 minute poses and a 40 minute pose. Having taken Alex Woo’s gesture class, I wanted to try to push the poses in certain instances.  I also wanted to play around with my new Pentel pocket brush pen!

I’ve been taking a gesture drawing workshop with Alex Woo, Pixar story-artist extraordinaire.  What’s really fantastic about this class, and also super challenging, is that Alex is teaching how to capture the gesture and not get caught up in the anatomy, or classicism, or realism.  What is the model “doing?”  How can you communicate the gesture quickly and effectively?  Simplify.  Exaggerate.

It may seem easy to simplify but it’s actually really challenging to switch off that classically trained part of the brain and get to the essence of the pose.  It’s a whole new way of approaching drawing for me, and most importantly it’s FUN!

Alex asked us to draw with our non-dominant hands for last night’s session.  Oddly enough, it helped us remove the crutches we tend to rely on and made for better gesture capturing.  Some of these work better than others, but I thought I’d share some of my efforts, goofiness and all.

Springtime in Yosemite is a quite a sight.  The massive snowstorms of this past season has led to a snowpack trembling under it’s own weight, melting into a raging mass of water that tumbles over the edges of cliffs like geysers shooting sideways.

So most of my weekend in Yosemite was spent hiking up slippery granite steps and trails to experience the gushing falls in all their springtime glory.  (And get thoroughly soaked in the process.)

I did, however, manage to sit myself down for a couple sketches later on in the week.  Here is Bridal Veil Falls.

And a fallen tree and some branches along the ground.

I managed to make it to a figure drawing workshop last Friday called Metamorphica held by the San Francisco butoh group Bad Unkl Sista.  Really phenomenal costuming and makeup, and some contemporary neo-butoh performance thrown in for good measure.

It was a bit of sensory overload but in an exciting way.  Truly a visual smorgasbord in a highly charged, creative atmosphere.  I have to say it was challenging to draw.  It had been some time since I did any figure drawing, and having the incredible costumes didn’t exactly make the process easier.  It does, however, whet the appetite for more drawing opportunities like this.

Clicking on the picture will open the larger size.