That year I learned how to draw fingers
Life Drawing in Singapore, 2019
September 2021, I went back to life drawing, during a pandemic, the model had to wear a mask while posing. We all had to wear a mask and social distance. It’s end of September 2021, and we’ve been wearing a mask whenever outside of our home, for nearly 20 months, and we might have to keep going for longer still.
These life drawing of Sonia felt easy, felt very comfortable like old T-shirt, I am very familiar with the angles, the shadow, the form and most importantly, the fingers and toes in particular, easy and fun. It didn’t use to be this way.
This is a life drawing process reflection. It was long overdue, I’ve probably never thought about my life drawing process as a creative process, let alone write them down. So here goes nothing.
I’ve been drawing life models, nude and clothed models for probably close to 29 years. The first one was in art college in the UK, and lots of frustrating weekly ones in New York Arts Academy. The NY Art Academy had the best variety of models I’ve ever seen. We had all age, gender, size and race of models come through the door of the studio.
Life drawing of intertwined fingers, circa 2017
Fast forward to Singapore, 2002, I had some teachers, not everyone’s method of teaching was good, mostly they’re there to let me practice and some rarely speak. But the ones who did make a difference, I still remember their words. Trust the measurement and angles says James Holsworth. The human body is in everything in our daily life, you can see reflections of bone structures in architecture, and design, says Mr Nama, and I remember hating classes where I had to recall what I see from the other side of the room, in Teguh Ostenrik’s life drawing classes. He said to look 80% of the time, and to draw only 20% of the time, and at the time I was like ‘wth is he talking about’. At these different junctures, I was just drawing what I see, and repeatedly, there’s a lot there that I saw that I just could not draw correctly.
Gesture of a standing figure from a fashion text book
Most of the time, the feeling of the drawing feels off, but the drawing actually looks right. Once we learn how to draw right, the next problem is that our human figure looks proportionate but stiff, lifeless, not alive. And this is the next stage for more and many hundreds of drawing stiff and lifeless figures, I finally figured out that a little exaggeration and gestures goes a long way to adding life and energy to the human figure. I learned this from teaching figure drawing for Fashion, where exaggeration is important, and gesture needed to be dramatised for paper. Until today, these are lesson I am still trying to articulate to my students when I am teaching how to draw people.
Life Drawing- just focused on the gesture, circa 2020
The exaggeration of gesture in a standing pose (from Demonstration I did in an online class in 2020)
I hated drawing fingers and toes. An oil painting teacher Mr Wee used to say how much he loved drawing fingers and toes and I could not relate. In every life drawing sessions, I try not to avoid fingers and toes, I just kept drawing them badly, and hoped that one day I will figure it out.
Years past…..
Barcelona 2019, I was in an open life drawing session, and the model had intertwined both his hands holding a stick behind his back, and I remember distinctly feeling a surge of positive joy, ‘by George I think I got it’ when I felt I finally figured out how to draw fingers. I could not find this sketch anymore, but I will try to describe what I figured out. The simplified fingers is one where the main outer line is the only thing I draw first, and that would suggest how the finger’s is shaped and the inner outline can be done minimally and that would immediately suggest that the fingers are all there even if I don’t draw everything.
Here are a series of those life drawings in Barcelona where I changed forever. When years of practice felt like a sudden click, it felt so sweet. But my goodness, was it far from sudden. Keep going, it will click for you too.
