How fast is a minute? As I mentioned in an earlier posting, I went on a sketching tour in Montmartre yesterday and I thought we would be sketching static objects like buildings, which we did. Then we moved into figure sketching. Yikes. That seemed to move things to a whole new and unanticipated level. The instructor, Romain, gave us a quick lesson on human proportions and then he assumed several static poses. We had a minute to sketch each one, pausing momentarily in between poses for him to provide feedback on our work.
As a final exercise, Romain adopted five slowly moving poses and we had one minute to sketch him in pen from head to toe in some part of each motion. Wow! Without a pause he would move to another dynamic pose. Each of those minutes went by really quickly and I felt like I was out of breath after five minutes of constant focus.
We all had a little laugh when the most skilled of the three of us taking the class ran out of time with one of her figures, which consequently had no head. It was a little ironic, because just minutes before we had seen a statue of Saint Denis holding his head in his hands. Saint Denis, a Bishop of Paris, was martyred for his faith in 250 AD by decapitation. A popular story claims that the decapitated bishop picked up his head and walked several miles while preaching a sermon on repentance.
For fun, here are a couple of pages from that final sketching exercise. I can understand better now why artists need so much practice and training.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
You do a lot better sketching humans than I ever did, and I did a lot of sketching.
Wow, that’s very instructive and interesting.. thanks for sharing Mike. Dami shared a lovely photo of the two of you – I was happy to see you both in Paris looking so well, nearly bought tears to me eyes.. I’d loved to have joined you 🙂
We both were marveling how you were the common point of connection that led to us meeting. Damien and I had a wonderful lunch and shared a lot about our past and present, about our hopes and dreams. The rapport was almost instantaneous. Thanks, Liz, for the critical role you play in bringing like-minded people together in the digital world and also in real life. 🙂
So amazing and wonderful that you were able to catch some time together!
These ate very good, Mike. I’ve tried sketching stuff, but humans are beyond even my imagination.
I suspect that you make detailed sketches for your projects that rely on mathematically accurate precision, but you probably get to use things like rulers. Now that you have more time, Dan, drawing could help to fill your time–though I am pretty sure that excess free time is not a problem from which you suffer.
I have always enjoyed drawing, Mike. Most of my projects start with a freehand sketch, although I tend to work on graph paper, to help keep the proportions correct. I use TurboCAD when I really want to be precise. I took a drawing course, a very long time ago, and I did enjoy it. I’ve been following Kate Powell for years, and I keep getting closer to picking up some sort of pen 😉
These are great! You’ve got great, dynamic mark-making in these drawings and a sense of movement and weight. Drawing a figure in such a short period of time is incredibly challenging and a moving figure even more so as the proportions and shapes and negative spaces change. I think you have done really well. My tip, if you don’t mind me offering advice, when it comes to gestural drawing in such short bursts is to not try to capture solid forms and instead try to grab just a sense of the form using a slightly more sophisticated “stick man” approach (meaning more points of articulation) or just swirls and scribbles that suggest the form – almost like the wrappings of a mummy. I am not explaining this well at all which is why I am not an art teacher!
Thanks for the tips, Laura. The “stick man” idea actually makes a lot of sense to me because it seems to rely upon the notion that the human body bends at different points, while the rest of the body stays more or less the same. Maybe I need to add sketching to the long list of things that I need to learn. It might move near to the top, because I’m learning that a good initial sketch really helps when I am doing watercolor.
I’m no expert, of course, but I’m glad my suggestions might be of use. I start out all my figure drawings with a stick man as it helps me get the proportions and angles right before I move on to more detail.
What a wonderful setting and experience. Well done!
For one minute you managed to capture the form and a sense of movement. A pat on the back is needed!!