Din A4 Wood Panel, Oil, 27 min
I have received some questions I'd like to answer here. Thanks a lot for your feedback!
Tell us more about your competition on December 3rd
The event on December 3rd is not a competition but an exhibition with other artists, where drawings/paintings of life figure sessions will be presented. I am glad about that ... I hate to loose!
What is the BBK Mannheim?
The BBK Mannheim is a local art institution. Lots of good stuff going on there, i just take part at the life figure sessions at the moment.
I think of going to a life figure drawing class myself and would like to know more
Every life session is different, depending on the organizer, model, preferences of the participants and length of the session.
A typical session of 2 hours plus 15 min break could look like this:
5 poses of 1 min, 3 poses of 2 min, 2 poses of 5 min, 2 poses of 10 min
break
1 pose of 15 min, 2 poses of 20 min
Those do not add up to 2 hours because it also takes time to find a pose and let the model stretch and recover after the longer poses.
What pose duration are you actually aiming at with your time limited figure studies?
From perspective of oil painting the longer poses are more interesting but i will probably try to use oils throughout and draw the faster gestures with brush and one color for warmup.
With my training from photos I aim at the poses of 10 mins and beyond. I have just figured out that for "home figure training" setting a strict time limit does not make much sense as it leads to frequent failure and frustration. A good training form should rarely lead to frustration. So instead, I do set a time goal for most studies (20 min for the one above), but i do not drop my brush when this time is up (which I would do in a time-limited study) but continue until major errors are fixed and the result is acceptable somewhat. I record and post the overall time needed (27 mins for the one above). It takes many years of work to become good at figure painting. So all i can hope for is to become a little better at it in the next three weeks. Anyway, I think one will see the before/after difference, due to my low level of experience and skill in this area. The project fits ideally into the season and forces me to work fast. Outside the plein air season there is always the danger of slowing down too much with still lives, master copies and own larger paintings.