Recent Life Drawing Pieces

As you know, I love creating figurative art, and I especially love drawing and painting people from life. So I relish weekly figure drawing sessions at Atwood Atelier--not only as an opportunity to keep practicing and improving my work, but also as a chance to have one evening a week where I get to focus completely on art, no matter what. And I get to spend time with a great group of artists, talking shop and sharing stories and eating hummus.

The models who sit for us range from people with a lot of art modeling experience to friends and acquaintances who have never done it before. It's a really interesting mix of folks.

Here are some pieces I've done at the Atelier this summer working from a variety of models. None of these are completely finished--this is about as far as I can get in four hours! They all have empty backgrounds and unfinished areas, which I may go back and finish at some point.

This woman is a local middle school teacher who told us about some of the awesome things she's doing to keep her students engaged. She also told us about her family's experiences living in Guam during WWII and later immigrating to the US.

It's a rare treat (and challenge!) to have a double portrait. This couple owns a local distillery and had some fascinating insights into the business of crafting spirits and the history of selling liquor in Wisconsin.

This fellow is a raconteur extraordinaire with a background in the music business...and plenty of offbeat stories that you can imagine hearing over drinks at a bar.

A baritone horn? Why not? It's always fun when models bring in props like instruments.

This fellow hails from Jamaica, and told us how much he misses his mom's home cooking.

This woman is a regular model for us. I particularly liked the elegant drape of her left arm in this pose.

Another pose I enjoyed, even though I didn't get to the model's hands!

For this pose, I focused on pushing the skin tones a bit for more expressive color.