Mel Gross Designs – the Creative Log

Category: Figure Drawing

  • A Very Creative Week

    A Very Creative Week

    I’ve been working on a lot of smaller projects recently, here’s a quick look into what’s going on in the studio:

    I’ve decided to work on a little gouache series to improve my admittedly rusty painting skills. I’ve chosen a few analog pictures I’ve taken in college to try and recreate. This first piece is pretty minimalist yet it was still a challenge for me. My trusty studio-helper always by my side of course.

    Another painting I finished (or decided that I did not want to work on it anymore) was this weird experimental piece based on an old figure drawing study. I like it but the bad anatomy bothers me and I’ve been considering cropping up the top part: it’s a stronger composition but I also like the gradient background. Which version do you like better? Full or cropped?

    I’ve also went for another figure drawing meet up this week and I tried somewhat of a new technique: watercolor pencils. It was fun to be able to blend in the colors and play with a paint-like medium without the pressure of using real wet-media. It was a single pose session, meaning we worked on this pose for two 45-min sections. I worked on a quick test first to figure out composition and colors and then moved to the real deal, I even splurged and used some nice watercolor paper. I also did a quick portrait sketch while the main one dried. Not my best work but it was fun 😉

    Another quick diy project I did this week was customizing some old sneakers that are starting to give out on me. I love them and wanted to give them one last chance. I’ve added the hand-cut duct-tape stickers to cover a hole, but the cute stars paired with the new shoelaces made me really happy! I’ve been rocking these and the stars have not fallen yet as I feared!

    I’ve been playing a Pokémon-themed tabletop RPG with some friends and I’ve been illustrating a few scenes from our adventures. Pretty cute and silly stuff.

    Lastly I was getting everything ready for my new ceramics class, which included sowing myself a little apron from some old PJ pants I had. The apron turned out great, the class, no so much. I’ll share more later.

    Life has been very busy with a lot of work, responsibilities and bureaucracies to deal with. However, I’m happy to find the time to sprinkle some creativity and crafty projects throughout the fast-paced routine I’m carrying out.

    Thanks for following along. I hope you’ve been using up your creative juices too!

    Happy crafting!

  • Figure Drawing of March

    Figure Drawing of March

    I’ve been striving to frequent more figure drawing meet-ups this year, to continue honing this craft. In a march I went to two different events. Here are the results:

    Day 1: “Long Poses”

    2-40 minute drawings with a professional dancer as the model.

    Medium: Conté sticks and dry pastel sticks on tonned paper.

    2 mins
    10 & 20 min
    30 min
    40 mins

    Day 2: “Medium Poses”

    1-20 minute drawings with a martial-arts practitioner as the model.

    Medium: Digital drawings done on the Procreate app using ‘6B’ and a custom ‘marker’ brushes.

    I am surprised that after almost a year without practice, my work-quality didn’t drop as drastically as I thought! I was expecting to be quite rusty and not get very good results. I guess the years and years of practice did pay off. Of course, I struggled with these and I see a lot of room for improvement, but it’s nice to see my progress.

    Overall, I am happy to go back to this live-drawing practice; it is one of the most effective ways to improve my drawing skills, combining anatomy, composition, dynamism, realism and efficiency training.

    In the future I want to practice the “polishing phase” of my drawings to achieve as much realism as possible in a more efficient way. For that to happen, I also need to continue improving my eye for anatomy and proportions. With a good base, the finishing touches come together a lot more easily.

    I also love playing with different materials – it is what keeps the practice fresh and exciting for me. This year I’d like to experiment with paints and wet mediums, which I haven’t explored much yet.

    One challenge I want to overcome is dealing with small shifts and movements of the model that can change up the whole pose over time. One thing I’ve been trying to do is notice which muscles are most tense at the beginning of the pose and avoid focusing too much on those right away, waiting until the body is relaxed and grounded before moving into details. This helps me avoid overworking areas that are likely to shift and makes the overall drawing feel more stable. I’ve also been paying attention to weight-bearing portions of the body and emphasizing line weight there to better convey a sense of balance and gravity.

    As always, I will keep you posted on how things progress and continue sharing my explorations.

    Thanks for following along and happy crafting!

  • Creative Check In #01

    Creative Check In #01

    Hi there crafters!

    It’s been too long! I’ve missed you… This past month has been a bit of a whirlwind — lots of emotions and a very chaotic creative process. And when that happens, it’s hard to sit down and post, because I’m too busy living the process to be able to distill it into words here. But I’m back with some creative updates for you!

    Lately, my energy has been all over the place: reconnecting with gouache paints, starting to learn filet crochet, finishing an embroidered notebook for my mom, and… spending way too much time playing Minecraft. Yep — I’m 28 and playing for the first time, and somehow got completely hooked.

    I’ve been diving into Redstone engineering (basically an electrical system inside the game) and building automated machines, pretty houses, and — embarrassingly enough — catching cute Pokémon, since my friends and I are playing a modded version. It’s nerdy, but honestly, it’s been fun. Not my usual outlet, but still a creative one. So I am trying to embrace it instead of being too hard on myself.

    I think I’ve been low-energy from a touch of seasonal depression (it’s the end of winter here) and because it was my birthday month. In Brazil, we call the month before your birthday “inferno astral” — “astral hell” — when everything feels off and internal challenges show up. It’s not always true for me, but this year I definitely felt it. So it’s been a slower season. Even working in a less focused way, though, I never fully stopped making. Here’s a look at what I managed to create these past couple of months:

    Filet Crochet: Textile Pixel Art

    I decided to try filet crochet because it kinda feels like textile pixel art. Fun, right? Except… it’s also so much counting and precision. No mistakes allowed. Of course, I complicated things by making a custom design. To make it manageable, I bought a pattern for the top so I’m not counting every single stitch blindly.

    The plan: a vest/top inspired by this Pinterest post, with my custom abstract/cybersigilism design worked in. I might add red embroidery on top to give it some color contrast, like the reference piece. Here’s the design template from Stitch Fiddle, and the pattern I’m following for the base is by Isabella Madsen.

    Counting these is the real challenge here…
    My cats are the best crafting companions
    In my Minecraft era, clearly

    Gouache Experiments

    I’ve also been slowly working on a painting over one of my figure drawing studies. It had a strong composition, and I wanted to play with layering gouache on top.

    My usual struggles showed up right away: color composition. The anatomy and volume came out well, considering I wasn’t using much reference, but the colors are muddy and blending together too much. I’m also trying to avoid leaning on line-art for contrast, which is my comfort zone, so that’s a challenge too.

    It’s not there yet, but it feels like it’s heading somewhere, and I’m enjoying sneaking in a few minutes of work on it when I can.

    One Finished Project (Finally)

    Among all these experiments, I did actually start and finish something: a beautiful embroidered notebook with Australian binding, made as a gift for my mom. That one I’m really happy with — a challenging piece with plenty of learning, but worth it. I am already working on a detailed process post all about this baby, so stay tuned for that. Here’s a sneak peak:

    Reading Fuel

    One activity that isn’t exactly “making,” but definitely feeds into my creative process, is reading. I’ve been trying to read more and even decided to double the number of books I’ve read this year. To help with that, I pulled a few titles from my to-be-read pile and went on a little book haul for extra motivation. Since taking this TBR picture, I finally finished a book I had been putting off forever, and I’m already a third of the way through Clarice Lispector’s ‘Perto do Coração Selvagem’ (Near to the Wild Heart ). I’m feeling good about my goal, my progress so far, and this renewed determination to keep reading. And of course, I’m always open to book recommendations if you have any!

    That’s it for now. I’ll share more progress on the crochet and the gouache piece in future posts. And hopefully, I’ll manage another check-in sooner rather than later.

    Until then, happy crafting!

  • Figure Drawing Thursdays: The Return of the Dead

    Figure Drawing Thursdays: The Return of the Dead

    Context

    I’m part of a local figure drawing group, here in Florianopolis (Brazil). They are called Modelo Vivo Floripa, and you can learn more about it on their Instagram page: @modelo.vivo.floripa

    I started going to the meetups back at the end of the pandemic, when I had just moved back to the island. I had been attending figure drawing meetings in Berlin and Philly before that, and so I wanted to continue the practice. I was also looking to make some new friends after losing contact with almost everyone I used to know here.

    This group meets every week and hires a freelance model (mostly not professionals) to pose for us for around 3hrs for us to practice live drawing. It is a great practice and I was going in weekly for over a year! I improved my techniques, I met many great artists, and I made lots of friends. However, when I started taking the woodblock classes, I found that I no longer had as much time to attend these events. I have not attended their events for months now, and I’m starting to miss the practice. This week I had some extra creative energy, so I decided to visit them and join this week’s meetup.

    The Event

    The group organizes 3 kinds of events focused on different times and styles. They have short, medium, and long poses events. Each one is designed to help you practice different aspects of live figure drawing technique. For example, short poses, which range from 30sec to 15min poses, are a great way to practice movement, mark-making, and composition. Longer poses (20+ mins) allow you to focus on shading, detailing, texture, etc. I have recently enjoyed going to longer poses and practicing my polishing techniques (after many and many days focusing on movement and dynamism, which is one of my favorite aspects).

    Throughout the years of practice, I’ve explored many aspects of figure drawing and I have drawers and notebooks filled with my studies. I’ve tried different techniques, I attended multiple classes and workshops, I experimented with different approaches and mediums. In the future, I can put a post together talking more about my experiences and my learnings from them. Today I just wanted to share the drawings I made in the meetup and introduce this topic to the blog.

    I was a bit rusty and worried I would not get good results, so I chose a medium I was comfortable with: colored pencils and a toned paper. The results are not amazing, but they are better than I hoped, and I’m happy with them.

    30 mins
    2-5 mins
    10 mins
    15 mins

    I unfortunately had to leave a bit early because I had already gone to the woodblock printing studio that day, and we met at someone’s rooftop; I was tired, and it was pretty cold! We used to have a partnership with a local university to use their classrooms, but we lost that, and we are looking to get back into a better setup. The lack of proper space and structure, and the lack of training of the models, is a big setback to me nowadays. Of course, this is not the most important thing, but it does make a huge difference to have a good, well-lit and comfortable place to work, and to have a trained model that can strike and maintain interesting poses for the artists. But any practice is good practice… right?