Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Seeing beyond the surface
For one of the sessions, our male model decided to cross dress and role play as a woman. He's done this before, and in the past, my drawings were representative of what was in front of me: a man dressing up as a woman. But today, I decided to ignore his gender, and to take gesture drawing to it's logical extreme - I started drawing him as a woman. I found that this exercise helped me really focus on the gesture and essence of the pose because I was forced to almost completely ignore any sort of anatomy I was seeing. I don't know if the drawings are any stronger than usual, but I think the important thing is that it helped me think properly. So the next time you figure draw, try drawing the model as the opposite gender, or even as an animal, or a character. It will force you to look beyond what you see.
