Report on the October 2014 meeting:

Nancy Carney: Creative lively figures with gesture drawing

Nancy Carney began the demo by showing examples of figures in art going back to 21,000 BC. “There is not one way to draw a figure,”she emphasized.

Carney fills notebooks with sketches of people at bus stops, at the doctor’s office, at art shows and wherever she goes. These sketches are then combined in various compositions for her paintings. She aims at capturing the “vital gesture”of each subject and approaches the sketch in one of several methods.

Sometimes Carney begins with a stick figure and then adds clothes. Other times she may use a “blob”method or her “tooth”approach or draws the clothes first. Nancy broke us into groups to sketch models in various positions using these different approaches.

After members had fun with gesture drawings of the models, Nancy explained the process she follows in bringing the figures into a painting. She combines figures from various sketches into a good composition. She then traces the design and enlarges it to fit the size of a painting.

After doing a value sketch and and a color sketch she transfers the drawing onto her paper with oil pastel crayons to retain the sketchy feeling. She then paints in the darks, allowing the paint to flow and mix from figure to figure. Light values and background come last. This hands-on interactive presentation is sure to influence our approach to figures in future paintings!