The Artist as Actor

One of the exercises we tried this week was to have the model strike a pose that embodied an emotion. I then asked the students to internalize and personalize that emotion (almost as if they were an actor preparing for a scene) before they started drawing. They ended up with drawings that were much more emotive and expressive than usual. The only problem was that because some of the students were so focused on the emotion, they forgot to think about the visual fundamentals of good design and staging. It's a tricky balancing act between the two states of mind, and it's something that I continue to wrestle with today. Here are some a few of the drawings I did during class: