Quick pose life drawing second attempt

I like a challenge.
On my second 3 hr stint of super quick poses (one and a half minutes, up to 3min poses) I determined to be a bit more assertive earlier on with my lines.
Rather than lightly plotting my main lines/masses carefully and faintly and then running out of time before I could attempt a contour line of any worth, I thought I'd minimize the planning and try and get those lines in before the timer ran out!
Instead of letter size, I'm working on 11"x17" paper as well, which I like better.
I think I'm heading in the right direction (at least for my current choice of medium, a prismacolor pencil). Here's my favorites (out of the 50-ish drawings I made).

Quick pose life drawing

I decided to do some life drawing.

Meridee runs a quick pose class (no instruction, just do your own thing) and finally dragged me along. 1min 30 second poses, up to 3 minute poses for the most part for 3 hrs. Maybe a 4 or 5 minute pose at the end.

Quick pose takes some getting used to!

I did a fair bit of life drawing at college and for a few years after (like every chance I got). Usually 5 to 30 minute poses.

I always used to take my time figuring out the proportions, direction, volumes etc as I went. There's hardly time for that, you just put your pencil down and the timer goes off. NEXT POSE!

Here's some of my wrong headed approach (for quick poses) from those first tries. I could make a start with an attempt at a methodical approach, but that's all. I was just starting to enjoy myself, then time to move on. A bit like someone giving you a shove every time you just start to drop off to sleep.

For any feeling of accomplishment I needed a more direct and immediate approach...

Friend and mentor John Watkiss will be missed by many

John Watkiss died a couple of nights ago, I am very sad to say.
He never got recognition from a particularly wide audience, but among his peers, if you can call lesser mortals that, he was well revered.
I’ll miss him, as will plenty more. He helped make my move to California a welcoming one too, as well as being the best teacher by a mile I (and many others) ever knew.
Generous, inspiring, overflowing with knowledge and talent, and with a playful sense of humor.

I wrote a three part series of posts about how the impact of meeting him affected me.

Here's a video of him taking himself a little less than seriously...

RIP John, the finest artist I ever met.

New Kickstarter - Bronze snail

New bronze snail currently up for pre-sale on Kickstarter, until August 11 2016

This bronze snail is my effort to create the finest bronze snail ever made available to anyone, anywhere.
If anyone shows me a better one, maybe I'll switch my goal and next time make the finest woodlouse ever.
Anyway, the snail was sculpted around an actual snail shell which my parents sent me from the English garden of the house in which I was born (breach birth as it turned out).

The project will run for two weeks until the afternoon of Thursday, August 11. So if you want to be the first to get this, at a nice discount too, then check out my project by clicking HERE, and that's where you can speedily make your pledge for this slow moving reward!

I'm going to send my parents back one after I have a bunch cast, so it will probably have tiny around the world luggage stickers on its shell when it arrives home!

That's a wrap! (1 year of whitteboard scribbles)

On this day last year I did a whiteboard scribble to celebrate junk food day, and posted it here. Every day since, for the last year, I've done another scribble to celebrate some of the daily 'holidays' that exist.

If you've enjoyed them, thanks! They were fun to do (most of the time)!

Here is a reprise of junk food day, this time in glorious animated-o-scope! Woo hoo!

Share it if you like it!