August and Drawing the Star Wars Meltdown

The Melty Draws of August

Monday marked my triumphant return to Drawmelt. I've been drawing almost non-stop since the last time I attended the extreme cosplay life drawing class hosted by the amazing Satine Phoenix, but there was still some rust apparent. Celluloid Girl met me at Meltdown Comics on Monday, and when we compared notes later both of us admitted to difficulty getting into the drawing groove. 

Where she focused on aspects of figure drawing that give her trouble, I busted out Mr. Eraser and worked from the school of "If at first you don't succeed, curse yourself for being a talentless hack, erase and try again." The enrollment is higher than you'd think. In the end both of us hit our stride and produced some work that was more than passable, and some that showed genuine growth. 

Shakti Shannanigans was nice enough to model for the evening. She wore a really interesting combination of Star Wars baseball hat, corset, leotard, and stockings. Shakti was also bright, funny, creative, and a lot of fun to work with. 

  

 

The first one was actually one of the last ten-minute poses the outstanding Shakti Shannanigans did before we moved on to holding poses for fifteen minutes. The amazing thing about this pose is that she held it the entire time and barely blinked. 

The next three were all fifteen minute poses. For the first of them she did this cool pose where she seemed to be looking out and beyond. She looked like a young woman looking to the stars and dreaming of ways to get there, so that's what I tried to capture.

The third pose was a cool classic pose; one hand on the hip and one hand brushing her hair back. If you look closely you'll notice a little bit of a difference with this one. For parts of the body I didn't use a "frame," or the stick figure I use to get a rough pose in a lot of my drawing. Instead I moved right to drawing the contours, especially the right leg. This is something I need to work on. I've been drawing the stick figures under the pose long enough now I know proportions and foreshortening. 

The next pose where Shakti is sitting was meant to be like a toy that had been thrown across the room. She looked a little like a marionette that had been set aside and forgotten. Anyway, that's the quality I was trying to capture.

When we moved to twenty minute poses Shakti started with one lying down, what she called a "curvy lying down pose." It's a classic pose, and one artists have been rendering going back hundreds of years, and there's a reason for that. It's f---ing hard, yo! I'm ok with the results, but I'd like to revisit this with another model at some point. 

In the last drawing I'm including here she asked us what we'd like to see. We gave her the idea of an android doing some self maintenance. She had her leg up on a chair and was working on a knee with lightsaber chopsticks. I thought that if she has to do maintenance on a limb, maybe she has to partially disassemble that appendage to get at the problem, so I left out her lower leg. To give more of an "android" look and feel I added some lines and circles at her joints to represent mechanical gizmos that allow her to walk around.

To get back into Drawmelt was a terrific exercise, and I recommend it to any artists living in the Los Angeles area. The evening is super laid back, Satine's feedback is insightful and constructive, and everyone has a good time hanging out an drawing. You can learn more from the Drawmelt pages on Facebook or Meetup.com.