Life drawing 30/5/17

Some shorter poses.. pencil on A3 paper

Sketches Oct 2015

Here we are!! I prepared this frame of sketches long ago, but I forgot to load on the web.

I hope you like!! I want to point out that on this smooth paper (the one you can find in cheap sketchbook in Tiger) the effect of copic maker is quite good and this three shades of warm grays can cover for  monochrome watercolor.

Still life

Here is a study I made recently during a collective drawing session. It is from life, in about three hours. I practiced measuring and chiaroscuro. I hope you enjoy. It's about 25x30 cm, pencil, charcoal pencil and white chalk on toned paper.

Arnovecchio Workshop wih Sandro Sacchetti (second Part)

Here we are at the second meeting in Arnovecchio for the drawing course. The weather was cloudy and almost rainy that day, but anyway we were able to finish the lesson. We drew from model in wood of mallard, male and female. They were still, so I had more time to refine the work. I used watercolor on a 25x35 (ca) Fabriano paper, and pencils in  my sketchbook for the awkward perspective of the female (about 5x5 cm).

The sketch in pencil

Final painting

And the female one:

From my POV it had more sense the positition of the tail as in the first B&W sketch. but finally it made more sense to modify a bit what I was seeing. This is not good, but hard not for me to do when drawing forsehortened parts. Maybe a solution is to firmly close an eye, and think in terms of form!

Figure Drawing at Florence Art Accademy

Hallo girls and guys!! Here are some drawings from the last months from the thursday free session of figure drawings at the Florence Art Academy.

3/3/2016 (couple of hours, charcoal on paper)

I'm quite satisfied with this. Maybe the head is slightly smaller then it was in reality. Also the left profile of the girls body could be a bit softer like the one of the arm. But I tried a bit too much to define form also to be sure that I understand them.

Sketches!!

Here they are some recent sketches. I think they are all from 2016.

This drawings are from the country near my home. The bird you can see in the second picture is a wild silent duck

Alternative world studies

Hello people!! I want to share this week something different. It's an old job I made for the entertainment illustration course. We had to develop some charcters and world features according to a narrative path. It was spring 2013.

I developed a couple of races, male and female, a couple of beasts and some sketches of the enviroment. I used pencil, pen and three copic marker for the tones.

Scketchcrawl Florence 23/01/2016

Hallo!! Last Saturday was the international sketchcrawl. I joined the group in Florence. We spent the morning sketching at the Marini Museum in Florence. That place was wanderful, an old church transformed into a museum. Also the artworks were great with lots of statues and paintings from this modern artist

Life drawing at FAA 29/10/2015 and 05-12/11/2015

Hello!! During the last week, I succedded in attending free figure drawing session at the Florence Academy of art. In this post I want to round up the last three drawings I made. And the pictures chronologically:

The height of the figure is about 20 cm. I'm quite ok with the right side, where the light gives up to the shadow. As usual, I had to struggle a lot with lower limb, and  no time to study the belly in depth.

Sketching nature in October

Here they are some recent sketches done on location. October has been warm and temperate, and also November seems to be the same. These are all from the surroundings of where I live:


A study of a tree, the way to render foliage with fineliner, and some zoom-in of the leaves and seeds (some sort of maple).

Life Drawing 22/10

Hello!! New year at the Florence Academy!! They are so kind that allow external people to attend a couple of hours of a posing model. This time I tested spolvero paper with a set of hard sticks brown pastel from Lyra. I should have drawn the entire body, but I preferred to make a portrait, because I was in a favorable position in regard of the model's face and also I wanted to warm up with something I'm more confortable with, that is the portrait. So first hour I was standing in front of the easel drawing the head, second hour I was sitting and sketching the whole body..

Drawing Course 4

I'll share today another couple of works I did in my drawing course.

Here it is a portrait from Giovanni Bellini "Men with turban". The reproduction I was copying from was as bad as usual. I think I missed some proportion, some features are off, and the chin is a bit diferent.. anyway, the portrait is something good to train yourself, because the similarity is hard to achive and dipends on the correct placement of every feature and every wrinkle, But initially you can't get lost in details, you have to focus on the main shapes, like the skull, the jaw, the gesture of the neck, the cheekbones, the height of the nose, of the eyes, of the eyebrows, of the mouth, and so on... There are some kind of different approach to drawing. As you can see from the lines on the copy, when you draw from a photo and you have to learn, you can trace some lines that lead you to reconstruct correctly the image. The accuracy of the measure estabilishes the similarity. It can seem like a boring surveying, but it's important when you begin to keep accuracy and patience to train the eye and the end. Even when you have done lot of exercise, you can do sometime this kind of copy to keep the habit. The "original"..

Drawing Course 3

Hallo!! Welcome to the third lesson!! Today another good exercise I made in my first drawing course. You need a pencil, better a couple or three (I had HB, 2B, 6B at that time). Perhaps you can do it also with  mecanical pencils too. And you need time and patience: I think, it took me 6-8 hours to do this, maybe 10. Don't hurry!! Stick on't!!
Another time this is "life size", in the sense that the drawing is the same size of the model. We had copy af an engraving, but I don't remember the author. You could complicate the exercise making the drawing a scale of the model: double time bigger, or smaller, or even a third bigger. This is no fun for me but it forces you to become more acquainted with measuring, and it also sharpen your scaling ability. For me the best part is rendering, so I simplified the drawing part.
Still today I think that I should go back and revise the measuring technique, make some paintaking life drawing measuring everything.. but hardly ever I keep this aim..
I suggest not to go as you can; work middle tones, layer after layer. Usually it's better a light sign than a heavy one. Of course you can go darker then...

June Sketches

An eucalyptus in Empoli:

Watercoulor, waterbrush and watercoulor pencils.

Drawing course 2

Here it is the second lesson. Unfortunately, we left life drawing and we began to draw from scruffy copies. But this was exhalting anyway!! And I was able to practice at home.

This is an etching from Giorgio Morandi

Drawing Course 1

Aye!! Today I want to post some very old drawings. To tell the truth... they are the first after a long time. In fact that's the drawing course which turned on the passion for drawing and painting...after the long sleep after the middle school courses. Ahh.. such a sweet time... It was the beginning of 2010. To tell the truth the passion for art was instilled after I took up a course in pottery.. but that's another post.

Sketch treno

Ecco un'altra paginetta:

Life Drawing at Florence

Life drawing session at Florence art Academy!! I prepared a toned sheet with a watercolour payne's gray basis.

And the final result:

The model posed for a couple of hours. I used graphite, sanguigne and sepia. I have to pay more attention to the lower part of the body, and foreshortening in general. But fun with some color compared with the use of sole graphite.

Scketch treno 2

Stamattina un altro volto del treno:

Sketch treno 19/01/15

La mattina (o anche la sera), se trovo qualcuno che mantiene la posa, non c'è miglior modo di cominciare che dedicarsi ad uno sketch! Sono un paio di anni che porto avanti questa abitudine e la consiglio a chiunque abbia la passione per le arti figurative. Purtroppo anche io non riesco a farlo tutti i giorni, perché effettivamente devo trovare qualcuno che dorme o al limite è immerso in una attività che lo distrae ma allo stesso tempo lo tiene fermo... infatti ancora non riesco a sketchare con poche occhiate e mi vergogno un po' a destare l'attenzione di un "malcapitato" modello... Comunque una buona pratica! Alcune volte i risultati non sono presentabili, ma comunque ci si allena.