Yet More Life Drawing

Another weekend, another great session at the Vallejos'. This past Saturday the model was Kika. Kika is a very small Brazilian woman, just over five feet tall and 200 pounds lighter than I am. She is so small, in fact, she was able to lie down on a folding table for a couple of her poses.

Kika is tiny and full of ripples as her skin moves over her muscles.

I tried to capture her in Conté, ink, and then pencil.

Then, feeling confident, I went ahead and tried something I don't usually do: I drew a portrait. I showed it to Liana and I said, as I usually do, "You know I'm not a portrait artist..."

"I think you have to stop saying that now," she said. Coming from her, that's pretty good, because she's an excellent portraitist.

Following the session with Kika Dorian made us dinner, which he likes to do. Then most of use returned to the studio and one of us became the model. Kristina Carroll was at the last session I attended, also, and both Liana and I were interested in her pale skin and dark braided hair. Both times I've seen her Kristina had this kind of quasi-Goth thing going -- sort of a colorful Goth, if that makes sense, what Kristina suggested might be a Fairy Goth -- with dark hair, milky skin, low-cut top, braids falling down onto her bosom, and crazy striped socks up to her knees. She has bright blue eyes to round out the image and an air of science fiction geekery -- you know, the prettiest girl at Comic-Con who isn't a paid-to-be-there booth babe.

Kristina is also an excellent artist. She's been doing watercolors that I've seen, and a few really wonderful traditional academic figure studies on buff paper. Her site has more.

Liana talked her into modeling after that session, too, but I had to go. This time I stayed. Dorian, Richard, and Liana were all going to paint; Reilly stayed even though he stuck to his pencil. Since the plan was to do one very long pose, I knew I'd get bored doing only pencil or Conté, so I borrowed some hard pastels from Dorian and jumped in.

Now, if you were to go to my online gallery and choose to view oil pastels, you'd see about 70 drawings. But you wouldn't see very much color. So this was my first real attempt as using pastels properly.

I discovered a lot of things doing this. First, I had no idea I could layer pastels as much as I did. I've only used soft pastels -- like the venerable Cray-Pas stocked in every New York City public school -- and they don't layer as well, especially if you don't use, you know, pastel paper. Second, I found I could rub the pastels into the paper with my fingertips and get some very subtle blends. Both Reilly and Liana told me I shouldn't use my fingers but I'm not sure why -- Reilly said something about skin oils and Liana murmured "It's bad for you" but I don't know if she meant "pastels are poisonous" (which they probably are -- if you eat them) or "your drawing will get messed up."

And finally I learned that I've been practicing enough to be an actual portraitist. "You got it," Dorian assured me, "You caught the likeness."

Meanwhile Richard did a lovely oil sketch. Reilly drafted a really impressive pencil drawing, a perfect full-figure portrait with a ton of hatching and all the details of Kristina's clothes and jewelry (some of which was wildly ostentatious, the better to be painted). Dorian did an amazing profile which was not quite a portrait -- he does portraits all the time, after all -- and Liana did this fantastic, fantastically tiny head for the full-figure Fairy Goth Art Nouveau Mucha kind of thing she's been working on.

I ended up staying until nearly midnight working away the whole time. As I said, another great time.