Focus

During the figure session: 

This drawing allowed me to slow down and pay attention to the figure and lighting situation more then the other ones that where a 1 hour drawing. This was approximately 2 hours of drawing time and 1 hour of reacting and designing the background while listening to the Black Keys to get that energy in the marks and quick decision making. 

 What I have been attempting to do when drawing the figure is increasing my level of focus by clearing my head with deeper breathing and decreasing the movement of my head and body (For the most part my eyes and arm were the only things moving during the session.) I love getting into what everyone recognizes as the "Zone" where time and space almost seem to disappear. I have grown to really enjoy the process of making artwork and one of those steps in the process is getting into the "Zone" where you forget about yourself and just focus on reacting and learning from the drawing process. What I have learned are various types of focus. In the beginning of a drawing I usually have tons of things running through my head and so to counter that I put on certain music such as Watch the Throne to get into an energetic focus. Then I begin to slow down and relax the marks and begin to react to the energetic under-structure that I build up and begin to refine and pay attention to the draftsmanship and design of the figure.  Afterwards I will smudge all of it because it begins to look to meticulous and I continue to refine the image by smudging and redrawing until the drawing is in between expression and draftsmanship. In this drawing I came more towards the technical  side which is what I shoot for in a live figure session and then the time afterwards I spend time to understand how to bring back that expressive energy by smudging some of the drawing. 

 After the figure session:

 After the figure session I usually don't change the figure drawing much and focus on learning different background designs that go well with the figure. Previous thumbnail studies from other projects come flooding into my head and I begin to select the ones that stand out the most like dot patterns that remind me of stars, making the drawing have an ethereal look, also curved lines for rhythm and movement. In every drawing I attempt to do some design that I have not tried before. Usually this goes into a series of failures that I learn from. In this design some of the small things that I began to learn from are the small square light shapes on her that lead your eye to areas of interest. Although they didn't make sense when I first did made them later I tried to re-examine why they worked well and logically try to explain if it helps my eye go through various areas of the drawing or not. In this case the marks almost remind me of sun flares which goes with the theme of ethereal figure. Seeing that in this visual space all things have a soft and hard edge and lost edges I applied that to the small marks around her so the marks fit in the visual language that I created with in the image. Hope you enjoy and I would love to hear what your reaction to the images are because you will most likely see something different then I see. Thank you.