Good Old Drawing: Cities; My City

It’s been a while since I did a drawing project. It used to be my thing before I started college. Drawing, for hours, cities and buildings on paper, with black ink ( I never liked pencil drawings–too dirty).

Last weekend, I finally had the chance to do a fairly large drawing project (about 25 hours of work). A drawing of the main square of my hometown, Durango, Mexico.

A colonial city, 500 years old, founded by the Spanish conquistadors as a local settlement along the “Royal Road,” which connected Mexico City with Santa Fe, now in New Mexico. The main purpose of this road was the transportation of precious minerals from the New World to Spain.

My city, founded near an iron hill which was though to be made out of silver, is now a 500,000 population state capital. During the last decade, the government has been restoring and even rebuilding much of the colonial heritage of the city.

It is a lovely town embedded between the western sierra and the desert of the Mexican Plateau. Hot and dry throughout the year, it is a great place to live in. This drawing is my orthogonal tribute to it.

Ink Experiments II

 

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Intro to Drawing: The Nude Drawing

I don’t know about other art schools, but nude drawing seems to be a very rare thing these days, and as far as I know, nobody has done it before in my school as part of the art program.

I felt truly lucky to be able to experience nude drawing. As I sketched the model before me, I learned a lot not only about drawing, but about beauty and the human body. Our model, who was a professional dedicated to modelling for artistic purposes, was by no means a magazine cover girl. She was real. No Photoshop, no fancy lighting, no  make-up or surgery, and of course, no clothes.

What a beauty.

Every time she struck a new pose, a felt a rush of delight as the skin, molded by the muscles beneath, acquired new depths, new forms and shadows. The nude human body suddenly became monumental to me, and supremely aesthetic. I was suddenly aware that the endless images we get from the internet and the magazines are indeed very flat, and unreal. That the faces and bodies we see there are neither beautiful or ugly, they simply do not exist, and for all they matter, are incomparable in truth and effect on our existence to the woman in front of me.

Yuri Romayenko, on first becoming the first human to travel in space, said after coming back to Earth that the cosmos was like a magnet. Once you’ve been there, all you can think of is how to get back.

Well, nude drawing is similar. Once you’ve done it, all you can think of is how/when to do it again.

Here are some of my “better” sketches from the three sessions we had with our model in Professor X’s class–the first time I truly saw the human figure.