Practice never ended
judging by the number of little people wandering around in the pages of Dad's sketchbooks
I wish I could say that these little people in this street scene were the result of an overnight miracle, but the truth is, this is a sample from dozens of pages in Dad’s sketchbooks in which he drew little figures.
Here’s another one, done in pencil. Note they are all approximately correct in their proportions as in, nobody looks grotesquely deformed. (Don’t worry, you’ll get to see some of those in a minute). It probably took him, like, three minutes to whip these off.
What is fascinating to me is that despite having painted several thousand canvasses over a career spanning almost 70 years he almost never included people in his paintings. His work was mostly representational and primarily landscapes, though he painted cityscapes and industrial scenes as well. He did a handful of abstract paintings and a series of self-portraits, but until he, my daughter, and I walked our Camino in 2017 he didn’t really include people in his work. **
That changed when the landscape was full of pilgrims - the experience was as much about the people as it was about the landscape. And, of course, the pilgrims were totally shaped by the landscape - huffing and puffing and limping up and down endless hills, stopping to dip their feet in burbling streams, sprawling in the grass at the side of the trail.
**The one exception to Dad’s aversion to including humans in his work that I can think of was a series of paintings he did as part of the Canadian Civilian Artists Program in the early 1970s. He went off to the Middle East to paint our peacekeeping efforts and many of the resulting paintings included both soldiers and civilians. The Canadian National War Museum has a few of those, two of which were included in the Brush With War exhibit that toured the country several years ago.
After yesterday’s post, I took a look at an online do-it-yourself course geared toward comic book artists. It made some bold promises about teaching me to draw people faster than a speeding bullet (as in, my drawing would progress apace, not that all the people would be moving quickly).
The step-by-step instructions reminded me over and over that a person is, on average, 8 heads tall. And, certain waypoints (the navel, the shoulders, the knees, the hips) are located at predictable distances from each other. The forearm is longer than you’d think, as is the overall size of the hand. The fingertips wind up somewhere mid-thigh when the arm hangs loosely at one’s side.
At first, the poses I was supposed to copy were pretty static and gave me a chance to practice drawing simplified versions of people (or, elaborate versions of stick figures). As I worked, I found myself humming the ankle bone connected to the knee bone…
Pretty soon, the poses started twisting and leaping (as one would expect from comic book heroes). It quickly got a whole lot harder to keep all those proportions more or less in mind when limbs were bending this way and that, shoulder and hip angles changed, and the figures were no longer standing still.
I drew some of the little dudes and dudettes multiple times and as I went along, there were moments when some part of someone actually looked like it was moving in a way that wouldn’t require an immediate 911 call. I could imagine hanging some clothes off the figures and fattening them up a bit - added some sprigs of hair for fun (though I think that’s probably weeks away in the tutorial series).
So, yes, I have a long way to go until my casual capture of a street scene comes close to Dad’s people-watching sketches, but one has to start somewhere…
That’s it for today. See you tomorrow :)