Drawing Exercises: Master Pastiches & Drapery

by Alden Cole on March 20, 2014 · 0 comments

ebony pencil drawings on paper, 13″ x 9″ • collection of the artist

VanGoMatiWatWP1963. Sophomore year, I started taking classes in my selected major — Apparel Design — to which was devoted the better part of three days. The other two days were taken up with continuing classes in 2-D Design and 3-D Design — three hours each — plus six more hours of Life Drawing. An early assignment for life drawing class was making pastiches of artworks by acknowledged masters. At left, three drawings from that series. Anyone recognize any of the masters copied? I’ll let you know tomorrow whom I admired enough to emulate in this way; that is if you can’t decipher the names in the bottom right corners.

Drape2,3,4WPAnother exercise: hanging a towel or some other drapery over a dowel, or pinning it up on a wall, or wrapping it around something with volume; then drawing it, plain and simple. Learning to create in monotone the illusion of 3-Dimensionality on a flat surface, which constitutes the magic of drawing. No straight lines here. It’s all about the creation of volume in space. Practice makes perfect?

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