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Not that I have the right to tell you, but this is what I’ve figured out.
Draw a big circle to fit the entire figure inside. This is to make sure that you don’t run off the edge of the page.
Draw a line for the spine. Just one line.
Draw a cup shape for the hips. Don’t draw more than that.
Draw a box for the torso, a circle for the head, and stick arms and legs. Don’t draw any other lines.
Turn the legs and arms into cylinders. Use no more than two lines each for this. That’s a cylinder for the lower arm, a cylinder for the upper arm, repeat four times. Block the torso in and turn the head into a sphere. Do exactly this and don’t do anything else.
The hand is a box. The foot is a wedge. Don’t draw toes. Toes are like teeth and eyelashes — as a general rule drawings look better without them. Don’t worry about fingers, if the hand is closed they’re a wedge, if they’re open it’s a cup, and if it’s anything else then draw an arc that shows where the fingers end and move on. Don’t draw anything on the face except for a line for the eyes and a line for the center.
And now for the most important part:
Actually follow these instructions. If you didn’t, toss that drawing, go back and do it again.
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If you have followed my instructions properly, you will have a basic figure, and most importantly, NO OTHER BULLSHIT.
Now you can scribble. Use the remainder of your time and attention to elaborate details. Do whatever you want. After the basic figure, which should not take more than sixty seconds to draw, you have enough information to work one pose any which way. I usually start with the hips and the inside of the weight-bearing leg, and then get distracted by the collarbone or the bridge of the nose or whatever I feel like.
Not drawing is, for me, the hardest part of drawing. It’s taken me a long time to realize that wasted lines not only cloud the picture, they cloud my vision of the picture and make proportions impossible to get right.
I’ve taking life drawing classes pretty regularly for a pretty long time, and let me tell you, scribbling straight does not work. Give up, because it is wrong. Even if you are getting good results, you could be getting them faster if you just draw what you intend and don’t draw what you don’t intend. Thirty second and one minute poses are wasted on scribblers. You will only feel mounting frustration if you attempt to approach short poses in any other way than this, which is breaking the body down to simple shapes and then elaborating them.
Which is what you are supposed to be doing.
Life drawing models are living in a different time zone from the people drawing them. For the model the seconds tick by like hours, and for the artists five minutes is barely time to get started. Models cannot possibly pose for the time that artists want in the poses that artists need. Strenuous poses hurt. They cannot be held for any length of time. But many of the most interesting poses are strenuous. In my opinion the best balance between the model’s needs and the artists’ lies at about three minutes. That’s short enough that the model can do something cool, but long enough that the artist can get a good drawing of it.
So if you can’t bust out a decent life drawing in three minutes you’re missing out on the best stuff.
A little background on the Yogurt Shop Murders
on February 9, 2012 at 1938Posted In: yogurt shop murders
These are stories from the Austin-American Statesman on the days of December 7th, 8th, and 9th, 1991.
Why is this important?
Because on the night of the 6th four teenage girls were murdered in one of the gristliest crimes I’ve ever heard of. If you know nothing about it, here is good place to start: http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2011-12-16/scene-of-the-crime/
What do these articles have to do with it?
Well, the first two photos are of a front-page story — it is the story that people would have been picking up and reading in the morning, as news of the murders first started to spread through the city. It tells the story of federal investigators raiding a prominent Austin policeman, and arresting his best friend, looking for evidence of a child pornography ring that was being run out of the Austin Police Department in 1991. They had already arrested the chief of vice, “Bubba” Cates, because he was involved in prostitution, pornography, and shaking down other local sex workers for protection money. The last part was the real problem. Cates was as dirty as they come, and federal investigators had followed the trail back to his superior in the APD and his friend Kallestad. They actually raided APD HQ at 8th and I-35. Kallestad was in jail for videotaping sex with a 15-year-old local girl. This is front-page news.
The third photo is from the paper on December 8th. Mr. Kallestad and Mr. Shaw are off the front page. There is talk of little else besides the yogurt shop murders. People are uniting behind the police as they track down the criminals. There is no further mention of Mr. Kallestad on Monday, if you were wondering. He is off the front page and he stays off the front page.
The sidebar story on the third page is interesting when you think, hey, a bunch of cops just got arrested yesterday for having sex with teenage girls, and then a bunch of teenage girls were brutally murdered, and honestly isn’t this sort of wildly suspicious timing? I never heard of Ms. Jessica Rose Marie Reeves before today, and she does not appear on the internet. I do know that Killeen is not far from Austin at all, less than an hour north.
The next article is from the 9th of December. I put it in here as pure speculation, but it certainly jibes with other things. It is my speculation that the killers are dead, and have been dead since very shortly after the murders. I have no idea who these people in the article are either — again, today is the first time I ever heard of them. But I would not be at all surprised to find that the real killers met their fate something like this, and it’s interesting that it happened on the 9th. I would also not at all be surprised to hear that the killers were rich, and it says right there that they were well known at the golf club. I’d like to know more.
I’d also like to be clear that I believe the APD of 1991 and the APD of 2012 to be entirely different animals. The police were flagrantly corrupt in the early nineties, and it caused a public outcry that has molded them into a model of a professional police department. I do not agree with most things that the modern APD does, and I have major problems with their base philosophy, but I want to be clear that I am aware of no connection whatsoever between the modern APD and the days of “The Family,” when Shaw and Cates ran a brutal domain. In fact, I think there is a strong movement within the APD that is as horrified by killings as anyone, and wish to bring the story to light. There are a lot of people who know a lot about this story in Austin. If you talk to people who were around then, it’s not as much a “We have no idea what happened” story as a “we know and we don’t talk about it.” Make no mistake; this was a terrorist attack, and it scared the hell out of a lot of people.
If I haven’t been clear, here are my conclusions: corrupt elements within the APD in 1991 commited or conspired the deaths of those four girls as a terrorist attack to distract the city from their own malfeasance. They also killed other people to cover their tracks. Most of those “elements” are now dead, retired, in jail, and powerless, so the story is really gaining momentum.
Your conclusions are of course your own, but that’s what I’m taking away from this.
Thanks a million to Aurelia Vasile for the translation! More will appear as I do them.
I really like Romanian! Me dragosta Romanian! That was some Romanian right there, probably. I just have met a lot of Romanians and went to my brother’s wedding with all our new Romanian in-laws and now that I’m rewriting my own script in Romanian, well, I think I know like several words now. Multomesk, Domana e Domule!
We have three thousand copies of our new newspaper, Rocksalt. It’s a monthly paper I’m doing here in Austin with Jeanne Thornton and the Austin Sketchgroup and random people around this world and internet. It’s basically the newspaper comics section without the newspaper.
We made the first issue, ran some ads, and printed three thousand, three hundred copies. All this weekend we were giving them away/selling them/shilling for donations with them at Wizard World Austin. We got rid of three hundred. Three thousand to go!
One amazing benefit of this is that, from now on, once a month, Jeanne and I will have to visit all of Austin. Quite a view of this city of ours.
Today I distributed another three hundred or so, starting at the Convention Center (because I’d accidentally left my bike there the night before) and moving up to Congress in a big loop to the Capitol and back, then over past Occupy to Barton Springs. As you can probably tell I designed this route to bring me to Barton Springs at the end.
Here are all the businesses that agreed to take copies of our paper:
Not technically a business, but I dropped off a stack of comics at Occupy. I figure they’ve got time to read.
And then it was dark so I went swimming. All in all it was an extremely rewarding day, and I think I may have sold an ad or two so it might even have been a bit profitable. It was definitely fun. It turns out that it is extremely easy to get businesses to take free comic books to give away. In the eyes of the average consumer, the right price for comic books is “free.”
In other news, if you are an artist and you are reading this and you want to submit work to our nifty little black-and-white periodical, you are positively encouraged to do so. You will get paid eventually, probably.
We’re going to start with Austin distribution at first and then see how it goes. Looking at the numbers, I think we can get this to pay for itself and a bit of our rent fairly quickly, and then we’ll just decide what we feel like doing. Since there are no news items in the comic, or movie reviews or horoscopes or whatnot, it can sit on the stand as long as it likes with no loss of value.
