One of the best decisions I ever made as an artist after I got out of art school was to return to drawing the figure from life in regular sessions.

Few practices are as challenging or rewarding for an artist as drawing the human form. The great traditions of Western art are founded on it and it is still one of the most fundamental aspects of artistic endeavor.

If you’re not a full time art student, finding a session for drawing from life is somewhat easier in large or medium size cities than in more rural areas, but it can be a bit of a challenge even there unless you know where to look. Often there are classes or workshops offered by art schools, museums and artists’ organizations, but you have to search them out.

It would be nice if there ware a central reference for them, and as it happens, I stumbled across a very good listing of over 500 such sessions across the U.S. and Canada. (If someone knows of similar listings in Europe and elsewhere, let me know and I’ll post the links.)

Figure Drawing Open Studios, Workshops, and Continuing Education Classes is a list assembled as part of the web site supporting The Art Model’s Handbook, a book aimed at those who work as artist’s models (a more demanding practice than most people realize).

Presumably intended as a service to models, they have provided an excellent list of classes and venues, organized by state or province.

I checked on the several classes and workshops in Delaware and Philadelphia that I have attended or am familiar with, including The Delaware College of Art and Design (where I teach an unrelated class), The Delaware Art Museum, The Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Sketch Club and the Plastic Club. The listings for all of them seem accurate and reasonably up to date, so I might assume that their listing for other venues in North America are similarly good.

Though I doubt it’s comprehensive, this is a great place to start if you are looking for a life drawing session.

Some are formal classes, but many are individual sessions or open studios that you can attend when you like, without signing up for a specific number of classes. Some of the latter are instructed, many are open studios where you are on your own to work as you like without instruction.

In most cases you bring your own materials, and the venue provides easels, chairs and sometimes even drawing benches. There is a moderator who administers the sessions and usually determines poses. Sessions can vary in length, but many are about three hours, with breaks for the models at intervals.

The listings give some indication of which sessions are devoted to long poses, short poses, or mixtures of short and long (the most common arrangement). Some offer sessions of clothed or costume models and portrait sessions in addition to more traditional life drawing sessions. (For a side take on non-traditional drawing sessions, see my post on Dr. Sktechy’s Anti-Art School.)

If you haven’t attended life drawing sessions before, you’ll find most of the sessions quite beginner friendly, contact the school or organization and see what classes or sessions they recommend.

As opposed to the more formal classes, most of the open studios and workshops are weekly, come and go as you please, and charge only a model fee for the session, usually about $8 – $10.

Most of the listings offer a link to the venue sponsoring the sessions, where you can find more details and contact information (it’s always wise to make sure dates and times are current).

The image above is by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, one of the finest academic figure artists, certainly one of my favorites, and is meant to be inspirational, not intimidating.

One of the most important things I learned in my continuing practice of drawing from life was to never be intimidated by comparing my level of drawing ability to someone else’s ability. Nothing will hold you back more. We are all simply at different points on the path, and the more you draw, the further you go.

What are you waiting for?

The good news is that since I last wrote about the wonderfully expressive and brilliantly realized illustrations of Tadahiro Uesugi back in 2005, many more examples of his work have been added to his web site.

The bad news is that the site is still in frames and as awkward as ever to navigate.

The domain name is simply a pointer to his original site, the main page of which is not very helpful for those who don’t speak Japanese; but you will find the almost hidden main navigation in the gray bar at the very bottom of the window. The Illustration section is the one of most interest.

Once there you must navigate by way of thumbnail images in a frame at left, that display the images in the main window at right. What isn’t clear at first is that the last image in the row of thumbnails is actually a link to the next page of thumbnails. The gallery continues this way for many pages.

However clunky the navigation may be, clicking through page after page will reward you with the wonders of Uesugi’s beautiful, spare and wonderfully composed images.

Many are simple figures composed of flat areas of color, often almost silhouettes; but my favorites are those in which his figures are presented in backgrounds that at times appear more heavily rendered than the figures; but on inspection are also composed of flat areas of color, occasionally with judicious applications of texture or pattern.

Uesugi has an astonishing command of design and color, and can pull light filled cityscapes out of an arrangement of geometric planes.

I think that many artists who might not initially find similarities with their own work would benefit from a second look. Not just illustrators and comics artists and animators, but landscape painters whose work is much more “rendered”.

Uesugi frequently manages to imbue starkly flat designed areas with a remarkable sense of atmospheric realism, simply with his astute choice of appropriate colors.

There may be texture, but there is no rendering, no modeling, no attempt to render form with anything but flat planes of color and patterns of shadow.

His use of shadow, in fact, is one of my favorite aspects of Uesugi’s work, a marvelous evocation of light told with a minimum of brushwork and complication.

Here would be a basis from which artists with more traditional and highly rendered styles might aspire to work. Imagine if you could start with paintings this simple but this complete before applying your more rendered style.

This is abstraction, not meaning “non-representational”, but abstraction in the truest sense, meaning to distill the essence of something into a simpler form.

A simultaneous fascination with detail and uncluttered open spaces led to an unusual combination of the two for Nigel (NJ) Cox, an Irish born artist now living and working in London.

Cox calls his stye Photorealistic Minimalism, and gives a description here of its inception and of the original work that started him on this particular path.

The majority of his recent paintings in that style are of figures walking away from the viewer, prone and foreshortened, or otherwise positioned so that their faces are not a prominent part of the composition, forcing you to see the figure as a figure, not a portrait. This is not only an unusual compositional choice but a contrast to Cox’s other emphasis which is portraiture.

You can browse through pages of thumbnails on his site, either from the home page or the Paintings page, and can continue to click through the larger images in the pop-up window.

For even larger versions of his work, including the image above, top, “The Black Basque” (larger version here), see Cox’s blog, Paintings from the Street, which also includes work not shown in his primary site.

Cox paints in oil on linen, and works in the traditional method of layers of glazes.

Born in the Philippines, Jeremy Enecio came to the U.S. when he was four, grew up in Maryland and studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He later attended the Illustration Academy program in Florida on a full scholarship from the Society of Illustrators.

He currently works as a concept artist at Big Huge Games/38 Studios.

His online portfolio appears to focus mostly on illustration and personal sketches. His paintings vary from oil and acrylic works with a painterly, textural handling reminiscent of artists like Jon Foster and Gregory Manchess, to drawing-like images with rendered areas contained by outlines that are often done digitally. He doesn’t list materials for his sketches, but many look like charcoal or the digital equivalent.

Enecio also maintains a blog on which you will find preliminary versions and bigger images of many of the works in his portfolio, as well as additional images.

Ukrainian painter Evgeni Gordiets was trained at the National School of Fine Arts, State University of Fine Arts and the State Academy of Fine Art, all in Kiev, Ukraine.

You will sometimes hear his paintings referred to as “sunny” or “serene” Surrealism. Though I doubt that Gordiets adheres to the actual tenants of the original Surrealists, his work does show their influence, but without the intention to shock or disturb. Instead, he offers a contemplative twist on reality, painted in a bright, detailed manner.

His work suggests a confluence of Magritte and Eyvind Earle, with a touch of Arnold Böcklin thrown infor good measure. You will also find brushes with pointillism and, as you go back in time, more straightforward landscapes and still life, rendered with a similar approach.

Gordiets compositions often follow similar themes, with foreground gardens or rocky outcrops set against an expanse of water and distant, sun bleached cliffs. They evoke a stillness and sense of timelessness, a feeling accentuated by a technique that carries hints of Renaissance landscape, though with a much lighter palette (see my posts on Jean Fouquet and Giovanni Bellini).

His palette is often light in value but muted in color intensity; at other times the colors are preternaturally brilliant and outside the range of nature’s normal colorations; including trees with blue or purple crowns.

I can’t find an official site for the artist, but he is represented by several galleries. [Correction: there is an official site, it just didn't show up in my initial search. I didn't think to simply look for the artist's name as the domain. Here is the official site: http://evgenigordiets.com, and the gallery page: http://evgenigordiets.com/art.html]

For the past week or so, Stephen Worth, Director of the always amazing ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive (which I have mentioned on several occasions) has been guest blogger on Boing Boing.

During that stint he has given us a series of treats including the Boing Boing Cartoon Circus, a list of some wonderful classic cartoons.

These are almost forgotten gems from an age when cartoon characters, and the imaginations of the artists, were wildly flexible.

The list includes such bizarre and delightful wonders as Grim Natwick’s Swing You Sinners (which Worth bills as “The Weirdest Cartoon Ever”); Terry-Toons’ The Last Roundup, in which Gandy Goose faces Adolf Hitler in the form of a pig; the Fleischer brother’s Popeye in Goonland, a delightfully looney excursion into weirdness (see my previous posts on Max Fleischer and the studio’s amazing Superman and Betty Boop cartoons); Bob Clampett’s Tin Pan Alley Cats, with a parody of Fats Waller; and the beautifully realized Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, a masterpiece by Grim Natwick under the direction of Ub Iwerks, which has some of the character of a Winsor McCay comic strip brought to life.

All in all a treat for fans of cartoon animation, swing jazz and/or overall weirdness.

For more, see the links on the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive under item #7 on The Top Ten Reasons to Contribute to A-HAA, for links to even more classic cartoons.

(Images at left: Swing You Sinners, The Last Roundup, Popeye in Goonland, Tin Pan Alley Cats, Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp)

Born in Mexico, Sergio Martinez studied art at the Academie de la Gandre Chaumiere in Paris, and has had a long career in illustration for book and advertising clients in France, Switzerland, Spain, UK, Mexico, the US and other countries in Central and South America.

That I haven’t encountered his work until recently just boggles my mind, because I think he’s an amazing talent.

Martinez maintains four separate blogs. Though the distinction in focus between them can be less that clear, it’s of little consequence as they all give you opportunity to view more of his wonderful artwork.

The two major blogs are Sergio Martinez Linework and Sergio’s Linework.. The others are Sergio’s Line-work Comments and Sergio Martinez Gallery. All of them seem to mix illustration with personal projects and gallery art.

Martinez has an unusual working method, involving carbon pencils, oil pastels and colored pencils on tracing vellum, worked by dissolution and blending from the back side with careful applications of turpenoid. There are also pieces in charcoal pencil, egg tempera and watercolor.

The result is a combination of line, texture and color that has some of the best characteristics of both drawing and painting, though I presume that one would call most of the works drawings.

The fluid, graceful linework, and linear applications of textural lines in colored pencil and oil pastel, give the images a loose, gestural quality; though as Walt and and Roger Reed point out in their introduction, his approach to the work is anything but casual. He often redoes images multiple times until arriving at a final he considers acceptable.

However free the application of materials may appear, it is always in service of highly accomplished draftsmanship and sophisticated compositions.

Though he doesn’t always give credits for the project associated with the images, he does give materials for each piece; a wonderful practice considering his unusual approach and variety of technique. One of his major clients appears to be BBC Radio, for whom he has provided illustrations for boxed sets of radio dramas. Other clients include Signet, New American Library, Disney Press NY, and Readers Digest.

Also a delight, is that most of the images on his blog are linked to larger images, and there are also large images linked to the cover thumbnails of his listed books for Good News and Crossway publishers (click through twice and look for text link to “High-resolution image”).

You can find a more extensive list of books he has illustrated on Amazon.com, and another on AllBookstores.com.

[Via Ericka Lugo]

The landscapes of Bill Turner come with invitations.

Most of them follow a compositional motif of roads, often central to the image, inviting you to step onto the road and follow it into the landscape.

Turner lives and works in the Atlanta, Georgia area. His landscapes, painted in oil and acrylic, are softly rendered, at times more suggested than delineated, and frequently cloaked in soft mist or atmospheric haze.

They are usually painted with a narrow, carefully controlled palette. His compositions, however, are bold in terms of value and shapes, with large dark masses set against bright areas of hazy skies (a hazy sky is actually lighter in value than a sunny blue one).

His web site includes a multi-page gallery of paintings, as well as a selection of reproductions.

Turner started as a photographer, and continues to work in that medium, with may of his photographic compositions using the same compositional device of roads to lead your eye, and imagination, into the landscape.

I cam across Turner’s work obliquely, through an “ambient video” experiment by technology experimenter Doug Siefken and composer Tom Salvatori, in which Turner’s landscape “sewell barn” (image above, bottom) is used as the subject for a piece called The Road to Sewell’s Barn.

In it Salvatori’s painting has been digitally manipulated to an almost monochromatic state and is very gradually restored to full color (and perhaps “pushed” a bit beyond). The suggestion in this case is of dawn breaking. The changes happen so slowly as to be imperceptible, like a real dawn.