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.
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?
