jayme del rosario | sketchblog

I’ve been getting finicky lately and needed to “reset” meaning take what I learned from Rick Piloco’s sketch class (which I took a few years ago). Think big, get the right value/color right, put it down and leave it alone.

My smallest brush was a large round size 6. It was a great way to prevent myself from getting too tight too soon so that I could properly work from general to specific. Also, in a 3 hour sketch (I’m just used to much longer) I usually run out of time before I an get to anything specific and I find that this can be a good thing for me.

oil sketch, 18" x 24"

Here’s a 3-hour portrait sketch done in graphite.

Jackie, graphite on paper

In my previous post on memory drawing, I mentioned the book The Training of the Memory in Art written by Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran in 1847. It is out-of-print but good ol’ Google Books pulled through and made this rare find easily available online.

Another great resource on drawing from memory is also now available here. Drawing from memory: The Cavé method for learning to draw from memory, written by Marie Elisabeth Blavet Cavé. Here’s a portrait of Madame Cavé, painted by Ingres, from The Met’s permanent collection:

Cavé portrait, by Ingres

The first line of the book starts out with the sentence,

“This is the only method of drawing which really teaches anything.”

I can’t say I fully agree that it’s the only method of drawing that teaches one how to draw, but it certainly shouldn’t sit on the bench. Hours, weeks, months and years of learning how to draw accurately from direct observation has been immensely helpful (and frustrating at times); it has really helped me train my eye. Drawing from memory on the other hand helps me test my knowledge and thus has helped me train my mind.

On a side note, I think that this is also why I find the sculpture and ecorche classes that I’m taking with Steve Perkins so helpful. Besides the fact that working from 3D to 3D has allowed me to really understand the form, masses, rhythm and structure of the human body more directly, Perkins’ rare knowledge of the forms and masses and how he presents this information works to build up my memory of the figure. I find that I am able to store this information of patterns in a simple way – I think of it as a diagrammatic, yet organic, hierarchical filing system. But I digress…

Both books describe wonderful and fun exercises in how to test your observational memory. We have a 4-week long pose this month and after spending this last week on compositional studies and a drawing study, I begin the underdrawing/painting this coming week. I plan to test myself with this month’s pose by trying out a drawing from memory next weekend.

I’d love to follow-up with a memory sketch in clay, but I’ll see how the drawing goes first. I imagine the 3D version will only stand a chance if I really understand the pose from a structural construct rather than a purely optical/shape approach. The prospect of finding out how much I possibly don’t know about about a pose I spend 80 hours on is a scary thought…but I guess I should find out sooner than never. I’ll post both memory sketches (2D and 3D) over the next two weeks.

figure drawing, male study

Here’s a 12-day study of a male figure completed during our morning class at the studio. I’m experimenting with toned paper and the use of white chalk. For now, I’ve decided to stay with graphite rather than switch to charcoal and white chalk. I like (or am used to) graphite and enjoy the subtlety you can achieve in the values with this medium. In the end, however, I’d eventually like to incorporate both charcoal and graphite in the drawing so that I can reach the rich dark that you can get with charcoal in a much more efficient way. At the same time, I can still take advantage of the subtlety and control that I am used to with graphite. I’ve tried this before with a cast drawing of an arm and the charcoal helped me progress the drawing much further without any loss of subtlety in the refining stages of modeling. I find it much more difficult trying to do this with the figure in the interior.