Forest Scene, Paul Weber

Roughly 6×5″ (15x12cm). In the Walters Art Museum.

Click “Explore Object” in upper left of image for zoomable version.

In my years of drawing from the model in life drawing sessions, as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts through additional classes at the Delaware Art Museum School, the Fleischer Art Memorial, the Philadelphia Sketch Club, the Plastic Club, the Delaware College of Art and Design and other venues, I’ve learned a couple of things about artist’s models.

One is that posing for artists is much more demanding than outsiders realize. There is a tendency to think that modeling is “just sitting there” or “standing still”, and as such should be easy, but that’s simply not the case, particularly not when well done.

That’s the other thing I’ve found — that some models take it quite seriously and work to be very good at what they are doing. From an artist’s perspective, it makes a big difference.

Often in open studio sessions, as opposed to more formal classes, there is little guidance from the proctor other than length of pose or standing, sitting, etc., and it’s left to the model to invent the poses. Ideally, these should be interesting, with some suggestion of movement or dynamics, but not so off balance as to be difficult to hold for the pose sessions (usually 20 minutes at a time, often with the same pose repeated over several sessions).

The best models manage to be creative in these situations, as well as knowing how to hold a pose — again, not as simple as it sounds. I’ve never had a problem with models who will “shake out” in the middle of a pose, and then resume it accurately. Models who are not good at holding a pose are more likely to gradually slump into a different position over time, like a melting glacier.

Poor models will also make it obvious that they are bored, or just biding their time until they’re paid. Good ones make it obvious that they are doing what they do well, with thought and attention to the pose, even if they’re mentally in another world while holding the pose.

Artist models are generally not paid well, certainly not in comparison to the skill that some bring to the task, in particular those with a bit of dance or theater training who know how to use the position of their body expressively.

Artists who are fortunate to work with a good model, however, have a much better chance of producing interesting, expressive work. At its best, it’s something of a collaborative effort.

Models, however, remain something of a forgotten element in the art community (even though some of them are also artists), with fewer resources available than for artists in general.

It’s nice to see a new (to me at least) website called artmodeltips.com that collects a number of resources of interest to those in involved in life modeling, as well as those who run drawing sessions or classes and hire and work with models.

It includes links to resources for life drawing sessions in 40 countries around the world, books and videos of interest to models, life model guilds and associations, instructional materials and other items of interest both to both models and to artists who do life drawing or painting.

The resources include The Art Model’s Handbook, and the Figure Drawing Classes, Workshops, Open Studios website (which I have written about previously), in itself a considerable resource for both models and artists.

[Via @StudioIncammina]

Cottage near the Entrance to a Wood, Rembrandt van Rijn.

If I were writing an illustrated dictionary of art terms, next to “economy of notation” I would have one of Rembrandt’s drawings.

Interestingly, for an artist whose paintings were primarily portraiture, many of Rembrandt’s etchings, and a high percentage of the drawings apparently done for his own pleasure, were landscapes.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Use “Fullscreen” link and zoom or download arrow.

Ashley Edge is an artist based in Manchester, U.K. who works primarily in graphite on board.

He has begun to post illustrations to a blog, beginning with some interpretations of stories by Angela Carter and H.G. Wells.

You will also find some graphite portraits, and reference to a project he is working on with designer and co-writer Elinor Rooks to create a drawing instruction course titled Draw Like a Boss.

Proko.com is a website maintained by artist and teacher Stan Prokopenko, in which he offers a number of free drawing tutorials as well as a full length portrait drawing instructional DVD that can be purchased through the site.

The free tutorials are among the best I’ve seen on the web, and to date feature instruction on drawing the head and facial features, basically in the manner of the Andrew Loomis method of construction (see my posts on Drawing the Head and Hands, Figure Drawing for All it’s Worth and Creative Illustration).

The videos are well produced, and Prokopenko has a nice breezy manner of instruction. There are also seasonal posts about drawing characters for Halloween and Christmas, and a post on his materials with instructions on his method of sharpening a charcoal pencil for “painterly” tone drawing.

The videos are also available on Prokopenko’s YouTube channel.

Prokopenko also has a website on which you can see his portfolio of paintings and drawings.

[Via Dave Gibbons: @davegibbons90 on Twitter]

Though he painted other subjects, Aelbert Cuyp is best known as one of the premiere landscape painters of the Dutch Golden Age.

His scenes of ships on the waterways of his native Dordrecht are filled with shimmering light effects, illuminated sails and glowing clouds. Even his humble scenes of cows grazing are given a romantic intensity, bathed in the glow of dramatic early morning or late evening light.

Cuyp’s landscapes have something of an Italian influence, even if only second hand through the work of other Dutch painters like Jan Both, who traveled there.

I particularly enjoy Cuyp’s drawings, of which made many, both as preliminary studies for paintings and apparently, like Rembrandt, for their own sake.

In fact I find in his drawings some of the same degree of simple observation, economical rendering and uncannily strong sense of place and atmosphere as I admire in Rembrandt’s drawings.

The best quality images I’ve found for Cuyp’s work on the web are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Google Art Project, National Gallery, London and the Rijksmuseum. Cuidad de la pintura is a great source for his drawings.

Dorian Vallejo is a portrait painter based in New Jersey. Though he sometimes sets his portraits in the more traditional toned or textured plain background, he often creates a kind of portrait that I particularly enjoy, with the subjects in background settings that are in some way relevant to the their personality.

In particular, his portraits in landscape settings are nicely evocative of time and place, giving the portrait a context that would be otherwise missing from a plain background.

His website includes a range of his portrait approaches, as well as a variety of subjects, from children to families to more formal professional settings.

There is also a selection of Sketches. These range from sketches in pencil and charcoal to more finished drawings to oil sketches. The oil sketches are much more free and informal than the finished paintings, and have a very different appeal.

There is also a selection he titles “Intimate Portraits“. These, as well as related life drawings, are done in very loose, gestural applications of mixed media (images above, bottom four).

A number of the life drawings have been collected in a book: Drawings: Inspired by Life, and there is a separate website devoted to them. This site has a more extensive selection, and though they are displayed somewhat small, they are in a zoomable interface.

Vallejo is the son of renowned fantasy artist and illustrator Boris Vallejo. He studied illustration at Parsons and the School of Visual Arts in New York and traveled and studied in Europe before devoting his attention to portraiture.

[Suggestion courtesy of Kelly Houghton]

[Note: some of the drawings on the "Drawings from Life" site could be considered NSFW.]

Fred Lynch is an illustrator and gallery artist based in Massachusetts who is also a Professor of Illustration at Montserrat College of Art and a member of the Illustration Faculty at Rhode Island School of Design.

His illustration clients include Random House, Viking Penguin and the Atlantic Monthly, among others. You will find a selection of his illustration work on his website under the heading “illustrator” under “commercial art”.

In the section for “artist”, under “paintings” you can see some of his gallery art, focusing on a series of coffee cup subjects, several of which are liquified funhouse mirror interpretations of the humble cup.

In both the “illustrator” and “artist” sections you will find a section called “journalistic art”. These are a series of wonderful location sketches, apparently in pencil, ink and washes of either monochromatic watercolor or colored ink.

The versions on his site are unfortunately small, but you can see larger images, and many more of them, on Lynch’s Flicker stream and on the Urban Sketchers blog, which is where I initially encountered his work.

I particularly enjoy his evocative drawings (many of them are refined to the point it’s hard to call them “sketches”) of buildings and streets in small Italian towns. He has an architect’e eye for architectural details, but renders them with a beautifully free line and precise but lively application of washes.

I love the way he plays with light and shade in these, note the white awning in the piece at top, and in the detail, second down, as well as the highlights on the steps and sheet in the wonderfully odd building with the central staircase above, fifth down.

Lynch often travels to Italy in conjunction with the Montserrat College of Art’s Summer Italy Program. There is a blog titled Drawing Viterbo devoted to the program that showcases some of the student work from the program as well as some of Lynch’s location work.

[Addendum: Lynch has been kind enough to inform me that there is a Tumbleog of his Italy drawings, and a blog that features his illustrations and stories for Paul Revere's Ride Revisited.]