I haven’t made it to our figure drawing session in quite a while, but I’m really hoping to get there this weekend. There is nothing like studying the human body to really learn how to see.
These quick 10-20 minute watercolor studies where done on Yupo paper sometime last year. Yupo is a type of plastic paper that doesn’t absorb paint like other watercolor papers do. All of the pigment stays on top of the surface, and thus is malleable for quite a while. I can paint in a form, and if I don’t like it, I can quickly lift it back to the white paper, or scrub it around til I find a shape I like.
Sometimes I like to lay in brushy, background tone first, describe the dark areas and then wipe the highlights back to white.
Other times I’ll paint directly on the white paper, massing in the dominant shadows and leaving the highlighted areas white. I usually bring only a watercolor tube of burnt siena and purple with me to class. Less is more.
The cool thing is: I can’t have too many high falutin expectations of perfection if I only have 10-20 minutes to capture a pose. I have to look very closely, and then paint quickly to try and capture what I see. This process often ends up producing looser paintings filled with a more powerful vibrancy than some of my 2-hour portraits.
