The Block-In
Blocking in is a great approach to drawing anything from the figure to a landscape or a still life. You break down the large shapes and work broadly paying attention to gesture, angles and distances. If you get the tilts and distances right, proportional problems shouldn’t haunt you and if you pay attention to perspective, you’re golden. It is a more linear approach to starting a painting or drawing — as opposed to mass drawing where the large masses are layed in very quickly. There is a cursory block-in set-up with mass drawing but it is very brief. Shapes are established very quickly and the block-in is used to set-up the gesture and general proportions of the subject. An analysis of shapes and their individual axis play a larger role rather than the linear tilts of each form. But don’t be mistaken, they are one and the same and knowing how to think in linear mass can only be an advantage. It’s the difference between lifting with your back or learning how to lift with your legs, both will do the job but the former is likely to do more harm. Here’s a block-in of last week’s figure pose.
Figure Block-In
The side drawing was a critique from Michael Grimaldi where he analyzed the rhythm and movement of the structural forms making an excellent parallel to a previous drapery workshop which the full-time/core program students took part in last month at JCSA, aka Janus. More on the block-in in a future post.
