We finally had a new model today, Elrond, from Lord of the Rings! Actually, his name was Eric, but he reminded me a lot of the iconic elf in Tolkien's saga. And I learned that either female bodies are easier for me to draw or I was just getting so familiar with Melody that drawing her was getting easier. I don't know, but I had some struggles today, for sure.

When Elrond, er, I mean Eric, disrobed, not only was I distracted by his remarkable similarity to an elf, but the piercings in his scrotum totally caused me to lose focus. Squirrel! And apparently the air conditioning in our part of the building was broken. The teacher spent the first part of class walking around with a thermometer so she could convince somebody to take her seriously and fix it. When class started it was 88 degrees and I was hot and distracted.

We started with gesture drawings again and mine were worse than usual. The model threw his robe sash over a ceiling beam and used it to support his weight in odd and unnatural positions. I couldn't even begin my gesture drawing until I had really given a good, hard look at the lines and curves he was creating with his odd positions. By the time I got focused, studied his form and picked up my pencil, the pose was almost over. I'm really just not fast enough!

He then got into a 25-minute pose and we were told to use the little measuring rod again to create a grid before drawing the figure. This ate up most of my time and my drawing was barely started when we had to stop. (Do you see a pattern?)

At this point, we had already had several breaks in the cool part of the building and nobody really wanted to keep drawing in the heat. So our next instructions were to draw for 20 minutes, take a break, then draw from the same pose for 20 more minutes. Although I was hot, I would have preferred to have more time, or to just go home. I can barely get anything done in an hour and now even that had been shortened!

Eric had a problem holding still. He had the wiggles. He had to stretch every few minutes. And apparently he itched. I have a new appreciation for Roderick, who can sit still an entire hour, barely twitching a muscle, before he needs a break to move. So here is my, again unfinished, drawing for which I have now given all my excuses for why it's bad. Really, all my drawings were bad today.


I look at this and see so many big mistakes, like the right forearm being too long (and the left, too short) and his head misshapen. But, hopefully I learned something and will do better next week. We are supposed to bring our small 5x7 sketch book Monday so I'm guessing we'll be concentrating on individual body parts, like hands and feet, next week.