Drawing at the Vallejos' has continued. I get there as often as I can and I continue to have a great time, although there are long stretches of time where the music can get really annoying. Last year somehow it seemed most of us had the same basic taste in Music to Draw By, but Dorian's wandered off a bit into atmospheric New Agey stuff (last Saturday I found myself saying, "Would you like the purple crystals or are you looking for something a little more upscale? We have a good line in yellow healing crystals in this display here...") and another one of the artists has this thing for Gregorian chants and it wouldn't surprise me to find the quiet girl in the corner wishes we had Jay-Z on. So Dorian's been putting Pandora on, with the enteraining effect of irritating everyone in the room when the "music like this" algorithm goes haywire and thinks Public Enemy could reasonably be connected to Elvis Presley. Or Elvis Costello, for that matter.
But the music's not important. What's important are the drawings.
Chris Rywalt, Niki, ink on paper, 11x14 inches
Chris Rywalt, Niki, ink on paper, 11x14 inches
Chris Rywalt, Niki, Conté on paper, 11x14 inches
Chris Rywalt, Rebecca, ink on paper, 11x14 inches
Chris Rywalt, Rebecca, ink on paper, 11x14 inches
Chris Rywalt, Rebecca, ink on paper, 11x14 inches
Chris Rywalt, Rebecca, ink on paper, 11x14 inches
Chris Rywalt, Rebecca, Conté on paper, 11x14 inches
Chris Rywalt, Rebecca, Conté on paper, 11x14 inches
Chris Rywalt, Rebecca, Conté on paper, 11x14 inches
These are really nice Chris, and I love the one with the purple scarf. Your lines are really amazing-very expressive.
Thank you. I like that one myself.
Hi Chris,I like Niki#3: the one of the torso with her hands folded. Really clean lines; I would kill to draw hands that well!There was a drawing session that I used to attend. One of the models, who thankfully didn't pose very often, loved to listen to Chinese funeral music. It was the most distracting, discordant music. Even ear plugs didn't help. I always left; just couldn't work with that stuff playing.
My father tells me -- I don't remember it too clearly -- that when I was young I read that Leonardo da Vinci wrote that hands are the most challenging thing to draw, so I spent a few weeks drawing nothing but hands. Since I started doing these Conté drawings a few years back, my wife's been picking on the hands, telling me they look wrong, they look like claws, or look broken. Which was because I was just tossing them out there, not working too hard. So this year I've been concentrating more on the hands so Dawn will love me again.Also, it helps prove I'm not all about the T&A.I think Leo was wrong, by the way. I think faces are the hardest thing to draw, portraits especially. I think the human brain is really finely tuned to facial features, and just getting them a little bit wrong throws the whole thing off.