Figure Drawing With Tommy Van Auken

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It's always a pleasure to do figure drawing with Tommy Van Auken. After the summer slide, we artists needed a way to get our creative juices flowing and adequate time to reflect on what it is we want to make. And so, every year, Coach invites him to work with us on figure, gesture, and rendering. I appreciate that this year we got time to do longer form drawings to work on our highlighting and shadowing(?) skills. We were all drawing so fast, he had to slow us down for the first time!I find that these classes always help me get looser, which is especially helpful when drawing people, as they feel more organic when done in gesture, and because it forces us to stray away from perfectionism, which is the bane of all art. I plan on using what I learned when I start doing portraits again, where you should see "shapes, not symbols."

I'm sad that this will be my last year doing figure drawing in class at MLWGS, but it has been a lovely experience that I will cherish, as it has made an impact on me and my art forever.

Go art dragons!